Proto-Indo-European

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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.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.