Proto-Indo-European

Assembled from 43 blocks · 3 evidence · 43 related

1. Story
2. The reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European languages: not a text, not a recording, and not a language anyone has heard, but a system of sounds, forms and words inferred from the regular correspondences among its descendants and written with an asterisk to mark that status. What has been recovered is substantial. The consonant system includes three series of stops and the laryngeals; the noun inflects for a set of cases across three genders and three numbers, including a dual; the verb distinguishes aspectual stems and marks person and number by endings whose irregularities recur across branches. Vocabulary is recoverable where all branches agree, and its content is itself evidence: securely reconstructed terms for wool, wheel, axle, yoke and the domestic horse suggest a community that had wheeled vehicles and secondary animal products, which places the proto-language after those technologies existed and gives an archaeologically datable earliest bound. The reconstruction is a hypothesis about a real speech community, and it is also, unavoidably, an idealisation: it flattens the dialect variation and the centuries of change that any living language contains.
3. Knowledge
4. The comparative method
5. Proto-Indo-European
6. Anatolia
7. The Pontic–Caspian steppe
8. Connections
9. Indo-European
10. The comparative method
11. Anatolia
12. The Pontic–Caspian steppe
13. Saussure posits consonants no language attests
14. Kuryłowicz matches Hittite h to Saussure's coefficients
15. Proto-Indo-European is spoken
16. A Bayesian phylogeny dates Indo-European to the Anatolian Neolithic
17. Ancient DNA finds a mass movement from the steppe into Europe
18. A hybrid model is proposed for the Indo-European origin
19. Language death
20. Contact, borrowing and the limits of resemblance
21. The regularity of sound change
22. Bayesian phylogenetic dating of language families
23. Sino-Tibetan
24. Afroasiatic
25. Proto-Indo-European
26. Sir William Jones
27. The Neogrammarian doctrine: sound laws admit no exception
28. Glottochronology proposes to date language splits arithmetically
29. Language in the Americas, and its rejection
30. Proto-Indo-European
31. Hattusa (Boğazkale)
32. A Bayesian phylogeny dates Indo-European to the Anatolian Neolithic
33. Phylogeography puts the Indo-European homeland in Anatolia
34. A hybrid model is proposed for the Indo-European origin
35. Ancient DNA as a check on linguistic prehistory
36. Proto-Indo-European
37. Proto-Indo-European is spoken
38. Ancient DNA finds a mass movement from the steppe into Europe
39. A hybrid model is proposed for the Indo-European origin
40. Evidence
41. Supports the steppe hypothesis as argued from reconstructed wheeled-vehicle and wool vocabulary, the archaeology of the Pontic–Caspian region, and the Indo-Iranian loanword strata in Uralic. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No page is cited and no reconstructed form is quoted from the book; the date of horse domestication, which the book discusses and which has been revised since, is deliberately not stated anywhere in this pack.
42. Supports the attribution to Saussure of the coefficients sonantiques — the abstract elements later identified as the Indo-European laryngeals. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The 1878/1879 discrepancy between issue and imprint is stated as it is conventionally reported and was not checked against the volume.
43. Supports the general account in this pack of the comparative method, the regularity principle, contact and borrowing, glottochronology and its critics, and the definition of a language isolate. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No chapter or page is cited, because the book was not opened in this session; the citation identifies the work a curator should check the general account against. This is the source named in the Journey declaration.