It's All PIE To Me!

“The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists...”- Sir William Jones

Just like Sir William, many other linguists have noticed similarities that are so systematic between the Indo-European languages. While this may be a coincidence, it is far more likely that all these languages share a common ancestor, which linguists have named Proto Indo-European (PIE).

According to Steppe Hypothesis, Proto Indo-European was estimated to be spoken about 6,000 years ago during the Late Neolithic period. Since it was such a long time ago, there are no known surviving artifacts. However, by reconstructing proto forms of the language spoken, scholars have learned more about the speakers' culture and religion. By reconstructing words like horse, gods, king, etc., scholars have learned that this society was a nomadic pastoral society that practiced a polytheistic religion.

So, you might be asking how did/do linguists reconstruct these forms. The most common method used is the comparative method. The comparative method compares corresponding sounds between sister Indo European languages and uses those sounds to reconstruct the original sound. For example, by using the Comparative Method, you can reconstruct the PIE word for father as *pater (N.B this reconstruction doesn’t account for the laryngeal). The Latin word for father is pāter. While the ancient Greek and Sanskrit word is pater and pitar, respectively. All three words start with a ‘p’, so it is likely that the PIE word also started with a ‘p’. The next letter is a little tricky because it could either be an ‘a’ or an ‘i’. However, Ancient Greek is the oldest of the three languages and is likely to have been the closest to PIE. Furthermore, Latin is not derived from Greek, and the only common ancestor they have is Proto Indo European. The fact that Latin and Greek both have ‘a’ as their first vowel highly suggests that the second letter in the proto form was also ‘a’. By using the same technique for every letter, you can recreate the original proto word!

Works Cited

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