Originally covered area from Great Britain to Asian sub-continent.
Map from Gamkrelidze and Ivanov http://www.armenianhighland.com/images/illustration130.jpg
Now extend across the globe.
Two major groups, described by the words they use for a "hundred": centum languages, and the satem languages.
Scholars recognized correspondences between the classical languages of Europe, principally Latin and Greek, and the classical language of India, Sanskrit, beginning in the eighteenth century. When they considered these correspondences, they concluded that the languages must share some common origin.
The languages have several roots in common. In other words, one may trace the etymology of words from each of these language back to similar roots.
Scholars have reconstructed Proto-Indo-European phonology and postulate that PIE had a phonological system with the "cardinal vowels" (/a/ /e/ /i/ /u/ /o/), which were could occur as either long or short vowels, and schwa.
An important element of the morphophonology of PIE is ablaut or vowel alternation. In its earliest stages, verbs (and probably nouns) were divided into different classes, with different paradigms, by the ways that the vowel alternated in the root syllable. Ablaut represents the change in vowel quality familiar to English speakers in words like run, ran, and swim, swam.
All these languages use inflection as their principal means for expressing grammatical relationships between words. Inflections describe the morphological endings that give grammatical meaning to words. For example, in this sentence, -ed represents the past tense morpheme/inflection of the verb, and -s represents the plural morpheme/inflection: The dogs walked.
Present-Day English has a much reduced inventory of inflections, but Latin has a much larger inventory of inflections, as do Greek and Sanskrit. From Vergil's Eclogues: deus nobis haec otia fecit; -is reflects the "dative plural" (expressing the meaning "for us"), -it reflects the 3rd person singular verb.
Scholars debate the nature of Indo-European syntax. Most agree, however, that PIE used a Subject-Object-Verb order as its basic sentence pattern.
Culture is NOT ethnicity. Much evil has been perpetrated in the assertion that the connections between Indo-European groups are ethnic connections.
Return to homepage