Re: What features do P-I-E languages have in common?

Mark J. Reed sikyal:

> Okay, my goal is to design a family of languages that all descend
> from PIE, but have been completely isolated from all other
> members of that family for the past few tens of millennia
> (give or take whatever it takes for there to have already been
> a PIE at the beginning of the isolation.  I'm typing without
> my references here. :)).
>
> So, my question: apart from the common vocabulary roots, are there
> any grammatical tendencies that are present more often in PIE
> languages than in non-PIE languages?  For instance, are most
> PIE languages inflecting, or specifically tail-inflecting,
> or whatever?  Or is the common set of roots the only family
> resemblance?
No, there's plenty more than that!

The PIE languages all share a common set of morphological endings, as
well. The complete set of endings is fairly large and somewhat vague, but
we can say with confidence that PIE was an agglutinative/inflecting
language utilizing mostly suffixes, with a few rare prefixes. Word order
was probably VSO or SOV, though it was probably also rather free. Verbs
were heavily inflected according to an aspectual system, from which tense
developed later. There were no 3rd person pronouns. There's pleny more,
too, which others will probably tell you about.

All of the ancient IE languages keep most of these features, though as
time goes on they lose more of them. Thus, it's plausible for a *modern*
IE language to be isolating (English) or mostly prefixing (spoken French),
but this only happens after several intermediate steps of sound change and
grammaticalization.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"

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