Indo-European Documentation Center
What is (Proto-)Indo-European?
Jonathan Slocum and Carol Justus
Nineteenth century comparisons of older languages such as Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Gothic showed that similarities among word forms with similar meanings were so systematic as to rule out chance or borrowing as an explanation. Such systematic similarities, it was argued, could only have resulted if the speakers of these languages once formed a community that then broke up as groups of its speakers migrated to different places. Because these languages ranged geographically from India to Europe, their unknown prehistoric ancestor was called (Proto-)Indo-European or, in German, (Ur-)Indogermanisch. The Indo-European (IE) Languages are divided into families, which are traditional groupings of the languages for which IE Texts survive.
Indo-European and Non-Indo-European Languages
At the same time that scholars were discovering genetic relations among Indo-European languages such as Welsh, Irish, German, Hindi and Bengali, among Finno-Ugric languages such as Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian, among Kartvelian languages such as Georgian and Mingrelian, or among Altaic languages such as Turkish and Mongolian, some also noticed typological similarities among the linguistic structures of genetically unrelated languages such as Japanese and Turkish. Studies of geographical culture areas such as the ancient Near East further show that culturally-linked regions may share non-genetic similarities. IE Linguistics discusses linguistic traits of Indo-European languages such as their sounds, word formation, lexicon, and grammar.
Indo-European Languages
Hypotheses about the nature of the prehistoric Proto-Indo-European language are based on comparisons of attested language data. Reconstructed proto-words or roots of words may be related, as shown by Carl D. Buck's semantic categories, all making up parts of the IE Lexicon. Semantic categories represented by words in the attested languages reflect IE Culture, and the culture of areas where Proto-IE (further abbreviated PIE) was once spoken.
The LRC's Early Indo-European Online (EIEOL) project is creating lessons to make texts in the older IE languages more accessible, while our Indo-European Typology project begins to index publications about Indo-European by topic, in particular those dealing with language typology.
Recommended Reading
- Buck, Carl D. 1949. A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. (A dictionary organized by semantic category)
- Lehmann, Winfred P. 1952. Proto-Indo-European Phonology. Austin: University of Texas Press and Linguistic Society of America. [Reprinted numerous times.] Online version edited by Jonathan Slocum, 2005.
- Lehmann, Winfred P., ed. 1967. A Reader in Nineteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Early landmark findings concerning the regularity of lexical correspondences) Online version edited by Jonathan Slocum, 2006.
- Lehmann, Winfred P. 1974. Proto-Indo-European Syntax. Austin: University of Texas Press. [Reprinted in 1980.] Online version edited by Jonathan Slocum, 2005.
- Mallory, J. P. 1989. In search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, archaeology, and myth. New York: Thames and Hudson.
- Mallory, J.P. & Douglas Q. Adams, eds. 1997. Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. London & Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. (As the name suggests, a large encyclopedia with many articles about IE culture and languages)
N.B. There are many thousands of publications addressing diverse aspects of Indo-European culture, languages, linguistics, and texts. The books mentioned above, though significant, represent but a tiny fraction of the total. The Journal of Indo-European Studies, among other journals, contains ongoing studies of Indo-European language and culture.