Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Proto-Indo-European Resource Masterpost

Last Updated 1/14/26 

As I spent a large chunk of 2025 going down the rabbit hole of historical linguistics, I read a lot of extremely niche academic papers, obscure blogposts, and assorted crackpot theories: I’ve gathered all the ones I can remember here to offset the field's bullheaded resistance to ever putting anything in one place. Heaven forbid academic reference material be easy to find.

This will, of course, be a curated list shaped by my own interests and biases. If you're here because you want to get into hobbyist PIE linguistics, I encourage you to assemble your own trove.

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Important Lessons to Know Going In

  1. Reconstructed PIE is a model - it's highly flawed, it's not an accurate representation of the historical reality, but it is the best we've got at the moment.
  2. Many resources online are out of date; there is no centralized database.
  3. Wikipedia is not a good source to get in-depth information about PIE topics, only to learn that the topics exist. You will likely find yourself having to unlearn things like I did.
  4. Literally anyone can post stuff to Academia.edu (which is a exceedingly enshittified website), and because the recommendation algorithm is a blind and senseless deity Academia.edu will regularly recommend you pdfs that are not peer reviewed / are not good scholarship / are not coherent and functional as a linguistics text / are basically just blog posts to a greater or lesser degree of quality.
  5. PIE the language changed radically over time, especially when comparing before and after Anatolian split off: PIE the reconstruction rarely takes this into account.
  6. The laryngeals are a headache and I highly recommend removing them immediately, or at the very least being judicious about where they are kept. 
  7. Go through morphology and lop off the stuff you know you don't want to keep before you start sound changes.
  8. Sometimes you need to make an arbitrary choice and stick with it: sound changes are a rabbit hole: go in with a target and don't let yourself get waylaid by what-ifs.
  9. Word-building is actually easier if you just make them yourself from a root list and the endings.
  10.  THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE LETTER - if you have to fudge things to make the project work, fudge to your heart's content. The rules are made up & the points don't matter. 

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The Indo-European Conlang Checklist

  1. So, why are you doing this? (d4)
    1. I like difficult and complex puzzles
    2. I am classically, King Lear Act 4 insane
    3. I have a high tolerance to frustration  
    4. I am desperate for a distraction from The Horrors 
  2. Have you reconsidered? (d3)
    1. Now that you mention it, backing out seems like a good idea.
    2. Ha-ha, I'm in danger! 
    3. I barely consider things the first time: full steam ahead!
  3. Are you sure? How about a sub-family? They're more reasonable. (d10)
    1. Proto-Albanian
    2. Proto-Anatolian
    3. Proto-Armenian
    4. Proto-Balto-Slavic
    5. Proto-Celtic
    6. Proto-Germanic
    7. Proto-Hellenic
    8. Proto-Indo-Iranian
    9. Proto-Italic
    10. Proto-Tocharian
  4. Won't be dissuaded? Suit yourself. How are you handling the laryngeals? (d12)
    1. I'm deleting them immediately, like a sane person would. 
    2. Rasmussen - h / x / ɣʷ 
    3. Kloekhorst - ʔ / q(ː) / q(ː)ʷ 
    4. Lindeman - x́, ɣ́ / x, ɣ / xʷ, ɣʷ 
    5. Keiler - / h / ħ / ʕ
    6. Bomhard 1 - ʔ / x / ɣ 
    7. Beekes -  ʔ / ʕ / ʕʷ 
    8. Kümmel - h / χ / ʁ 
    9. Meier-Brügger - ʔ / x / ɣ(ʷ) 
    10. Kortlandt -  ʔ / q~χ / qʷ~χʷ
    11. Pooth - ʔ / χ / ʕ
    12. Ringe -  ç / x / xʷ
  5. And if those are too normal for you... (d4)
    1. Szemerenyi - h [1]
    2. Martinet -  ʔ, h / χ , ʁ, ħ, ʕ / χʷ , ʁʷ, ħʷ, ʕʷ [2]
    3. Bomhard 2 - ʔ / ħ͡h / ʕ͡ħ / h [3]
    4. Pyysalo - aɦ / ɦa [4]
  6. Glottalic theory: yea or nay? (d10)
    1. Traditional - Plain / Voiced / Breathy
    2. Hopper - Plain / Ejective / Voiced
    3. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov - Aspirated / Ejective / Breathy
    4. Beekes - Plain / Preglottalized / Aspirated
    5. Kümmel - Plain / Implosive / Voiced
    6. Clackson - Plain / Creaky / Breathy
    7. Shcirru - Plain / Preglottalized / Slack
    8. Kortlandt - Geminated / Ejective / Plain
    9. The Tocharian Option - Fuck all this, collapse everything to plain unvoiced stops.
    10. Fuck it, they were actually affricates [5]
  7. Centum, Satem, or the Forbidden Third Option? (d4)
    1. Centum - Get that god damn palatovelar series out of here.
    2. Satem - There will be no labialized consonants under this roof thank you very much.
    3. Menage a troistem - All three dorsal series are present, no there will not be an explanation. [6]
    4. Qantum - plain velars were actually uvular, palatovelars were plain. [7]
  8. How are thorn ([alveolar stop]+[velar stop]) clusters getting resolved? (d8)
    1. No change; TK => TK
    2. Metathesis; TK => KT
    3. Assibilation; TK => sK
    4. Deletion; TK => *K
    5. Metathesis-Assibilation: TK =>KT => Ks
    6. Metathesis-Deletion: TK => KT => *T
    7. Metathesis-Assibilation-Deletion: TK => KT => Ks => *s
    8. Metathesis-Deletion-Affrication; TK => KT => *T => *Ts 
  9. Do the S be mobile? (d4)
    1. Mobile S is present in all cases. [8]
    2. Mobile S is absent in all cases. [8] 
    3. Mobile S is present seemingly at random 
    4. Not only is Mobile S absent, it seems like it never appeared in this branch: any roots that pattern as STeDh are now DheDh. [8]
  10. Am I finally done? (d1)
    1. No. You're in it now. Welcome to Wonderland, we're all mad here.

[1] - Not a mistype, just one laryngeal with no coloring effect: he supposes PIE just had more vowels and ablaut patterns than thought.

[2] - The book is in French so I have no idea how he defined which environments got what. 

[3] - As used in his book on Nostratic; the sounds used for h2 and h3 don't appear in PHOIBLE, Wikipedia, or cursory google search, so take that as you will.

[4] I'm including this one because it exists; I do not care to spend the time to wrap my head around this theory, which considering what I have spent that time on should say a lot.

[5] This is extremely unlikely in reality, and I don't know of anyone who actually supports it.

[6] To my knowledge, no daughter languages keep all three. Melchert claims that Luwian did, but it doesn't look like he has gotten significant support on this

[7] This is not an uncommon stance, and it does play nicely with the laryngeals being uvulars, but it isn't the mainstream of the model.

[8] To the best of my knowledge, three of the four options here are not extant, I just included them to make a table. 

** 

The rest of this post is going to be links to resources and citations, divvied up into categories. While I am grouping by quality, I am compiling by quantity, and so I will include sources do not align with the mainstream of the field, which may also be sources that I don't agree with / don't consider to be good sources / are just plain wrong: I will notate these accordingly. Those whose contents I have forgotten i make no such promises for.

Recommended Reading

Books I would recommend to people who don't give a shit about conlangs but are modestly interested in PIE. 
  • Beekes, Robert: Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction (2011)
    •  This is probably the best general-audience overview you're going to find, or at least that I've found. Beekes manages to cover an enormous amount of material in an approachable and thorough manner and doesn't get lost in the weeds. 
  •  Mallory, J. P., D. Q. Adams: The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo European (2006)
    • The other gold standard. If you have bit of linguistics knowledge going in or a willingness to learn you'll have a good time. Where Beekes is the all-rounder, Mallory & Adams is more specific, divying up the reconstructed PIE vocabulary by topic and combing through to see which words are best attested, and how they came to be.

 

 

The Big 4

The ur-resources.

  • Pokorny, J. Indogermanisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch (Indo-European Etymological Dictionary) (1959)
    • Out-of-date. Does not contain laryngeals or Anatolian material. Still somehow the most approachable lexicon. You can find a cleaned-up online version via the University of Texas: if you want fewer moving parts for your project and don't care overly much about accuracy, it's servicable. There's also a edited / cleaned up / laryngeal-including version here, though I can't find who was behind it.
  • Rix, Helmut, Martin Kümmel et al. Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben (Lexicon of Indo-European Verbs, LIV)
    • Has not been translated into English.
  • Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series
    • Incomplete; the project turns 35 next year and the promised grand unified replacement for Pokorny is most likely dead in the water - the most recent of the dictionaries was released in 2014. You can, of course, not find all of these in the same place, because Indo-Europeanists break out in hives when things are too convenient
  • Wikipedia & Wiktionary
    • A cobbled together mess; outdated information is everywhere, along with shoddy and questionable reconstructions. Use with caution.

You will notice that I throw shade on all these sources: this is because they are inadequate and are unlikely to ever be replaced. Your average fan wiki has better organization than this field. 

Andrew Byrd at the University of Kentucky has been working on DERBi PIE (Database of Etymological Roots Beginning in PIE), but the website is basically just a holding page and given how funding for the humanities has been going the odds of seeing it to completion are lower than even the extremely low rate of the field.

 

Top Billing

Articles which I think are good for just understanding PIE / the most useful ones for conlanging.

  • Byrd, Andrew: Reconstructing Indo-European Syllabification (2010)
    • Byrd's stuff is generally just good to look into, since he focuses a lot on reconstructing PIE as a language that people spoke over a algebraic formula. 
  • Byrd, Andrew: The Rules of Reconstruction: Making our Etymologies More Grounded (2017)
    • That is, if you can find his papers - I had found this paper on Academia within the last year, but since then it and all of Byrd's other papers have been pulled from that site and further searching led me expensive dead ends. I am reminded, once again, of why not going on to higher ed was a blessing, I would lose my fucking mind with this recursive walled garden.
  • Gąsiorowski, Piotr: The use and misuse of evidence in linguistic reconstruction (2012)
    • A useful reminder about how reconstructions are never set in stone, and how they can be shaped by bias and lack of data. 
  • Kiparsky, Paul: Compositional vs. Paradigmatic Approaches to Accent and Ablaut (20XX) 
    • Origin point for a (thankfully, it seems, gradually catching-on) alternative to the traditional PIE accentuation schema, which tosses out the rather arbitrary categories with a series of rules that can be applied to derive the patterns that have been reconstructed in a natural and logical manner. A few other works cited in this post build on this paper, and I'll mark them as such.
  • Kümmel, Martin: On new reconstructions of PIE "laryngeals", especially as uvular stops (2022)
    •  This is, in my amateur's opinion, the best argument I've yet seen made for the laryngeals and their identity: namely, that they pattern in Hittite like a fortis / lenis or unvoiced / voiced pair, and taking other  aspects into account were probably χ and ʁ, which he notes does not rule out earlier q and ɢ or later h, x, or ħ.
  • Kümmel, Martin: Typology and reconstruction: The consonants and vowels of Proto-Indo-European (2012)
    •  Wins a slot here for being simple and functional: he goes through the available evidence, compares it to the patterns of modern languages, and comes up with serviceable answers for the plain voiced series and the development of the vowel system.
  • Weiss, Michael: The Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals and the Name of Cilicia in the Iron Age (2016)
    • If Kümmel's 2022 paper above is the magic bullet, I consider this to be the smoking gun: when Hittite proper nouns were transliterated into neighboring languages such as Akkadian, the laryngeal descendant ḫ was consistently written with symbols for uvular consonants instead of pharyngeals (since Akkadian made that distinction and Hittite did not).
  • Yates, Anthony and Jesse Lundquist: The Morphology of Proto-Indo-European (2018) 
  • Yates, Anthony: (Reconstructing) stress assignment in Hittite and Proto-Indo-European (2016) 
    • Builds on Kiparsky: the Hittite evidence checks out in favor of the Compositional Theory.
  • Yates, Anthony: Some basics of Indo-European Phonology (2018)




Personal Wildcards

Articles that I, personally, think are great specifically for me, but which might not be particularly sturdy hypotheses or are otherwise nonstandard. We all get to have a couple Crank Credits as a treat, and these are mine.

  • Adiego, Ignasi-Xavier; A little-known law on the root and syllable structures of Proto-Indo-European (2022) 
    • This paper, combined with Jan’s below, has me convinced that at least some of the laryngeals were approximants formed by vowels breaking under stress, because there are a lot of roots that otherwise inexplicably pattern as CHVR. So much PIE scholarship ties itself in knots over *i and *u. If the same sound is *ew when stressed and *u when unstressed, that means that stress broke the vowel
  • Bičovský, Jan: Proto-Indo-European laryngeals and voicing assimilation (2019) 
    • h3 being treated as voiced and labialized has always felt weird to me, because neither of those traits are necessary to fulfill the criteria they supposedly fill: the voicing assimilation premise is based on exactly one word, and labialization is based on turning adjacent *e to *o, despite no other labialized consonants doing that. Jan here is in the same boat, and he lays out a solid case against the traditional reconstruction and paired argument for laryngeals as having both fricative and approximant realizations.
  • Gąsiorowski, Piotr: Another long grade: Non-canonical ablaut involving PIE *ā (2013) 
    • Speculation on the mechanisms that could lead to an *ā ./ *a ablaut series in PIE. I appreciate that it's labeled as non-canonical up front.
  • Monti, Nicolás: The twofold development of PIE *o in Greek, Italic and Celtic (2026-) and Again on the reflex of medial PIE *ō (2026-)
    • These papers have gotten several updates since I first became aware of them, so I'm linking Monti's main profile page instead. These are some pretty radical papers (as in, what they propose would rewrite half of the reconstructive model if true) and they are very much still WIPs, but they're also the sort of theory where I kinda want it to be true. Wanting doesn't mean being, of course, but the theory is easy to understand and can probably help simplify a lot of a conlang project.

 

Laryngeals & Laryngeal Accessories

Now you too can be driven to rend your garments and pluck out your beard like an old testament prophet whenever you see an H!


Other Phonology Articles

Because there are, in fact, non-laryngeal sounds in PIE

 

Roots and Syllables

Little nuggets of sound

 

Stress and Accent

Let me tell you how much I have come to hate mobile accent since I began this research...


Placeholder Category

For stuff that I either can't sort into a different category or can't be bothered to.

 

The Pooth Zone

Roland Pooth is either an absolute madman or 100% on the money, no in-between. His interpretation of PIE as a Semitic-style root-and-pattern language plus direct-inverse alignment is extremely out there, but even if he is completely wrong, he’s still made a cohesive and consistent model that provides coherent explanations for some of the otherwise inexplicable elements of the traditional model, and that’s a fair sight better than most of the field. I'm not linking his entire corpus here, but enough to give you an idea of what you'll be dealing with.

 

Indo-Uralic & long-range stuff, etc

Take all of this with a complimentary salt lick. I don't support any of these theories beyond "it'd be really cool if that was the case" / "yeah there's a good chance of a connection, but there's no way to prove it"; you'll find out in short order that people can make themselves a semi-convincing argument for a relationship between PIE and damn near anything, which will be entirely incompatible with every other semi-convincing argument. This is fine if you are doing Conlang Shit, because you can just arbitrarily pick a version you like and roll with that.

 

Helpful and / or Silly Stuff I Found on Reddit

It ain't peer-reviewed, but sometimes plain speech and the freedom to shoot the shit is fruitful. You will notice an abundance of links to r/linguisticshumor: this is because r/linguistics dried up under extremely strict posting rules.


Assorted Blogposts

Some of these are from 5-10 years before some sizable developments in the field, and so are a bit diminished when it comes to accuracy. But, they are amateurs for amateurs and that's got it's place, especially if your goal is conlang stuff and the spirit of the law takes priority over the letter.

 

I Do Not Vouch for These

Still potentially good for inspiration, though caveat that emptor.


Useful Resources

Don't leave home without 'em.

 

So What Have We Learned? 

The people writing fanfics about the statue that shits blood and then kills you instantly are better at organizing and cross-linking their work than historical linguists.

 

 


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4 comments:

  1. DanJanuary 14, 2026 at 7:17 PM

    Oh those nutty Yamnaya.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lady MapiJanuary 14, 2026 at 8:56 PM

    Long time reader, first time commenter!

    This is going to sound silly, but... have you tried sending Andrew Byrd an email about the papers you can't access? If you're lucky, he might just straight-up send you copies.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. DanJanuary 14, 2026 at 11:01 PM

      Welcome!

      The main impediment to sending out emails is that I am perennially awful at staying on top of my emails.

      Delete
    2. Lady MapiJanuary 14, 2026 at 11:59 PM

      That's fair!

      If you go to the literature page for the 'Roots of the Ancients' project he's part of (which is here: https://rota.as.uky.edu/articles/), the link to Rules of Reconstruction is dead... but it was captured by the internet archive, so you can still access the dang thing.

      Giving it a skim I'm not sure it's really worth it as a source (the rules are "There Must Be Evidence",
      "Base Your Reconstruction Within the Language System", and
      "Be Mindful of Linguistic Universals and Tendencies"), but the range of reconstructions is so wide that someone in the field going "ok guys, sanity check your work" is probably useful? I dunno, I'm a librarian, not a linguist. :p

      Delete

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