Showing posts with label PIE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PIE. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Proto-Indo-European Resource Masterpost

Last Updated 2/22/26 

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.

**

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 Many resources online are out of date; there is no centralized database.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the recommendation algorithm is a blind and senseless deity Academia.edu will regularly recommend you pdfs that are not peer reviewed / are not good scholarship / are not coherent and functional as a linguistics text / are basically just blog posts to a greater or lesser degree of quality.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. 

**

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.
  • Moniz, C. Ryan: PIE vowel quality and accent approaches (2022)
    • An excerpt from an undergraduate thesis that compares different theories of PIE's vowel space and accent structure. Extremely helpful if you want to just want to compare options and pick one. Cites a bunch of sources down at the bottom, several of which are also in this list. 
  • 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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Saturday, April 5, 2025

Lets Build a PIE Conlang 2: Water and Fire

Part 1: Introduction and *h₁n̥gʷnís

Let’s get right into it.

1. *wódr̥

This is the most common recon!PIE word for water, surprising absolutely no one. It's not the only word, but it is the generic one vs the more active "body of water" found in *h2ep. I’m actually going to do this one backwards.

1.1 -r̥

*wódr̥ is a fun one, because it’s what’s called a heteroclitic stem: In the “strong” cases (nominative, vocative, and accusitive) it ends in *-r̥, but in the “weak” cases (everything else, but genitive is the standard example), we find an *-n̥ where we’d expect to find an *-r̥ (ie *wódr̥ / *wédn̥s).

This is one of the clearest traces we have of PIE’s internal history: r/n stems are pretty rare outside of the Anatolian languages, indicating that they’re the leftovers of an older system (just what I am looking for), and the trace of an old sound change is obvious. They’re all also neuter nouns, so another point for animacy distinction.

Since it ends in a syllabic consonant, I can slot in an **ə in front of *-r̥, being a reduced / unstressed **a.  Then I just wind back *r < **n  and we have **-an and a new step to our sound-change list

Final N > R Shift: **n > *r when word final, following an unstressed **a / **ə

(This is going to need more specificity in the future, because we’ve got those pesky *-mn̥ stems to deal with.)

Word progress: -an

1.2 d

Plain voiced stop, no special circumstances, this is going to be **t’ (or, since the stress is on the first syllable, **’t.)

Word progress: -’tan

1.3 ó

No avoiding it now; it’s time to rip off the bandage and talk about vowels.

Traditional recon!PIE operates on the assumption that every syllable has a vowel slot, which can potentially hold *e, *o, the long versions of those vowels, or nothing at all. These are called “grades”, and are used to describe ablaut patterns: a slot is in such-and-such a grade in these cases, then shifts to another slot in other cases, it’s such-and-such grade when stressed, and this-or-that grade when unstressed. It’s all terribly complicated.

*a doesn’t fit into the ablaut patterns at all, so a lot of reconstructioneers will say “oh it’s an allophone of *e when adjacent to *h2” because that does fit ablaut patterns, and every other case will be written off as a marginal phoneme inherited from nursery talk or loanwords.

This runs into two problems: Problem 1 is that the traditional ablaut patterns might not be true in the first place. Paul Kiparsky (2010) suggests an alternative that he calls the Compositional Model, where stress placement previously treated as arbitrary ablaut patterns are the result of a process of several underlying rules applied in a specific order. This theory has not caught on with PIE studies at large (likely because it throws out like 50% of the entire field), but I find it a lot more appealing, understandable, and reasonable than the patterns and paradigms.

Problem 2 is that there are languages with only two vowels out there - conveniently located right next door in the Caucasuses - but those vowels are never /e/ and /o/. All the languages that have only two or three vowels will distinguish them by height, not by backness.
  • Abkhaz has either /ɨ/ and /a/ or /ə/ and /a/, depending on who you ask.
  • Kabardian and Adyghe have /ə/, /a~ɐ/, and /ā/.
  • Ubykh and Arente have /ə/ and /a/
(Note: these languages tend to have a lot of allophonic variation, where the underlying vowel is pronounced differently according to its surroundings - similar to what is reconstructed for PIE. So you can get an [ə] that sounds like /i/ or /u/.)

You will notice that all of these languages have /a/. In fact, the only languages I know of that don’t have /a/ are Arapaho and its closest relatives, and even then they have /i/ and /u/ to pick up the slack and it’s clear by comparison to the rest of the family that they had /a/ at some point and later lost it.

So either real!PIE had a vowel system that has never before been documented in a human language, or recon!PIE is using misleading symbols out of tradition.

(You can guess which side I come down on)

Kümmel (2012) posits that at least in early PIE, *e was **æ  ~ **a and *o was **ɑ, which was itself descended from ***ā. This is, ultimately, the base I will be using because it requires the least amount of jumping through hoops (I will still be jumping through hoops, and I don't have all the edge cases hammered out yet, so for now all we need to care about is that *ó is **â (I’m using circumflexes for when it is both long and stressed)

Word progress: -â’tan

1.4 w

I have two options available
  • Option 1: *w in this environment is **w, final word is **wâ’tan
  • Option 2: Long high vowels (**ī, **ū) split into (**ya, **wa) > (*yo, *wo) when word-initial. Final word is **ʔû’tan.
Erring on the side of aesthetics, I gotta go with Option 2. That’s a goodass word right there, we’re cooking with ‘ank’ʷani now!

2. *péh₂wr̥

This is the other recon!PIE word for fire, which was much more common than *h₁n̥gʷnís and represented fire as a substance (-r̥ on the end is a sure sign of a neuter noun)

2.1 p

*p is **p, no issues here.

Word Progress: p-

2.2 éh₂

At last, my nemesis reveals itself.

*h₂ is the reconstructioneer’s magic bullet. You can drop it in anywhere to explain anything: it can turn *e into *a, it can turn short vowels long, it can aspirate voiceless stops, it explains ablaut paradigms; it can be a consonant, it can be a vowel, it can be a consonant that acts like a vowel or a vowel that acts like a consonant. Depending on who you ask it, it can be reconstructed as *q, *qq, *x,  *χ, *ħ, *ɦ, *h, *ʕ or *a. I am certain there’s a paper out there claiming with utmost sincerity that it can turn lead into gold and resurrect the dead.

Kümmel (2022) once again saves the day with what I think is the most convincing argument. Short version:
  • The *h₂ &  *h₃ laryngeals inherited into the Anatolian languages were a fortis-lenis pair (likely voiced/unvoiced) of uvular consonants - probably fricatives, but stops is possible in the extremely early stages.
  • This applies only to Anatolian languages and Homsar Hol, since it’s clear that they work differently in Strongmadian and Strongsadian PIE.
This all aligns with [A PAPER THAT I LOST THE LINK TO GOD DAMN IT], who comes to a similar conclusion by analyzing Anatolian terms that were loaned into neighboring languages that had more robust scripts (Anatolian languages were mostly written with inherited cuneiform, which wasn’t designed whatsoever for them). All fine and good, but I am still not satisfied. Time for some major creative license and a new list of principles:
  • I am operating under the assumption that the *H series changed so radically between Homsar Hol and later Strongmadian and Strongsadian PIE that they were essentially independent sound systems.
  • If there’s attestation in an Anatolian language (ie, if ḫ shows up), there’s definitely a laryngeal there (either *h₂ or *h₃, they used the same symbol for both)
  • If an Anatolian cognate shows no sign of *h₂ but it’s reconstructed with one anyway, the reconstruction is incorrect and there was just normal **a.
  • If there’s no Anatolian cognate at all, we go by secondary evidence and vibes.
  • Voiceless aspirates in Indic languages are decent evidence of a laryngeal being there, though I am less certain on what kind.
  • Long vowels on their own are not sufficient evidence, since there are other ways for long vowels to form than just through laryngeal deletion + compensatory lengthening.
    • Example: *muHs (“mouse”) is typically reconstructed with an unknown laryngeal to explain why the descendants have a long /u/ - I am going to apply  Szemerényi's law and Occam’s Razor and say that either A) the original form was *mus-s and Sze’s law kicked in as normal or B) it was originally *mu-s and Sandall & Byrd (2014) are correct.
  • Greek Triple Reflex is insufficient justification on its own - if there’s no other evidence, I’m saying it was probably just a regular-degular vowel. Maybe if the vibes are good I’ll pick and choose.
  • If the only justification for there being a laryngeal present is vowel coloration, it’s suspect.
  • *h₃ had a backing effect, not a rounding effect; if it turned *e into *o because of labialization, then the *Kʷ series would have done it as well.
  • If all other options are exhausted and there is no way to rule out a laryngeal or identify it, the dice decide. 1-2 are *h₁, 3-4 are *h₂ , 5-6 are *h₃.

Finally getting back to the word at had, this one comes with easy Anatolian attestation via Hittite paḫḫur and Luwian pāḫur. That double form is unique to  *h₂, so I’m going to add a bog-standard unvoiced uvular fricative **χ. *e is **a, naturally.

(I could have *h₂ = **q, but I am saving **q for the time being.)

Word Progress: paχ-

2.3 wr̥

Here we get another heteroclitic stem; the *r̥ is **n, but we do have another variable with the vowel. This ending is attested in Hittite as -war, so I'm going to make things easy for myself and go with **-wan; since it's an unstressed vowel we get a nice clean shift of **-wan > **-war > *-wr, with Anatolian languages either inheriting **-war whole cloth, or just adding an /a/ back in.
 
Final Word: paχwan

3. Dictionary entries

  • ʔû’tan (IN): Water as a general substance, regardless of size, state, drinkability, or other factors. Generic, non-branded water.
  • páχwan (IN): Fire; typically a controlled fire (campfire, cooking fire, fire for illumination, etc)

Since I started with words that were all a root + a suffix, I can add some derivational suffixes as well.
  1. ʔank’ʷaní = ʔank’ʷa + (a)n + í
  2. ʔû’tan = ʔû’t + an
  3. páχwan = páχ + u/w + an
Which, after tweaking the existing definitions, end up as
  • -(a)n (SUF) - Generic inanimate / passive nominalizer; turns root verbs into nouns
  • -i (SUF) - Forms nouns of animacy / activity
  • -ani (SUF) - Forms animate / active (but not agent) nouns from verb roots
  • -u/w (SUF) - Forms action nouns from verb roots
  • -wan (SUF)  - Forms object nouns from verb roots

Or to break it down:

  • páχ- = "to warm"
  • páχ-w-  = "(the action of) warming"
  • páχ-w-an = "warming thing"

 

4. Corrections and Revisions 

Despite liking Glen Gordon's "labiovelars come from reduction of an older /u/" theory, it doesn't really jive with how I'm going to be handling vowels anymore: that step has been axed. Since only one word was effected, that barely means anything.
 

5. Conclusion

Well, I'm having fun. Don't know about all y'all, but I'm having fun. So much idle musing and scribbling on sticky notes is finally starting to become something coherent - honestly, I think it's the format that does it. Much easier to get my thoughts in order when I force myself to describe it to an audience step-by-step.
 
It's honestly a really cool feeling seeing things start to snowball - with the right groundwork and basic rules laid down, the rest just kinda flows naturally.
 
I think I have one more of these in the tank for the time being, then doubtlessly more stuff later on down the line. Don't want to overdo it and scare everyone away.
 
 


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Saturday, March 29, 2025

Let's Build a PIE Conlang 1: Intro + First Word

TLN sent me this ages ago

I have been deep-diving on Proto-Indo-European linguistics for the last year for Conlang Reasons, which has filled me with useless knowledge that makes me very fun at parties. Now, after many false starts and nigh-constantly running up against one wall or another, I have returned from the depths with treasures. And / or eyes on the inside.

0. Prelude to the Introduction

The first thing to get out of the way is this: PIE studies are bullshit (slightly affectionate) for reasons you will hear a lot about; the second thing is that this rabbit hole is so deep I am bumping elbows with Tsathoggua, which makes for blogposts bogged down in tedious explanations of each and every weird thing in a desperate attempt to make any of this chicanery make any sense at all.

So as to avoid dumping everything on y’all all at once, for this post I’m only going to do an introduction with my goals & design principles, and then go through an example word sound-by-sound to show how I got from the abstracted reconstructed version to the conlang proper.

Third and potentially most important thing to get out of the way first: there is no “true” PIE; there was a dialect continuum spoken by some Eurasian steppe nomads, and that dialect continuum drifted and fragmented over thousands of years as its speakers spread out across west-central Asia, India, and Europe. Reconstructions of PIE are an abstraction used to describe a language we have no attestation for; they’re closer to algebraic formulas than an actual language, and they are algebraic formulas composed with limited data, bias, best guesses, academic dogmatism, outright crankery, occasional bits of insight, and every other skew you can possibly think of. Ceci n'est pas une *h₁éḱwos.

This is made infinitely more frustrating by PIE reconstructioneers (this is the official technical term) and lay linguists alike using “Proto-Indo-European” to describe the reconstructed language-abstraction and the real historical language(s) interchangeably, despite the former being a work of artifice set in amber outside of time and the latter being three goblins and a horse in a trenchcoat. I myself will be guilty of this, but I will try not to be by saying "when I say how something works in PIE, I am talking about how linguists think real!PIE worked according to how they have built reconstructed!PIE like some sort of word-demiurge, not how it actually worked in reality". 
 
General time periods will be named according to a schema of my own devising.
  • Homsar Hol - Prior to the divergence of my as-yet unnamed language family; “Pre-Indo-European” or “Pre-Indo-Anatolian”
  • Strongbadian PIE - Prior to the divergence of the Anatolian languages from the core continuity; “Proto-Indo-Anatolian”, “Proto-Indo-Hittite”, or “Early PIE”.
  • Strongmadian PIE - An era of significant differentiation between core and fringe speakers; “Middle PIE”
  • Strongsadian PIE - Total dissolution of the core speaking community, dialectal continuity completely lost by this stage; “Late PIE”.
Branches and their lower-order reconstructions aren’t really going to show up here, so I will just use their normal names.

Now with all that out of the way, let’s get inside baseball.

1. Introduction

Emboldened by the flame of ambition, this project began with two must-haves:
  1. It was going to belong to its own branch of the greater Indo-European family (and likely become very weird because of it)
  2. I wanted to retain the infamous mystery-consonant laryngeals in some form.

Point 2 immediately gave me no shortage of issues, because outside of a few edge cases in Iranian and Armenian the only descendants to retain laryngeals are the Anatolian languages; Anatolian languages are so divergent from all the others that you need to consider pre- and post- Anatolian split as wholly different stages of the PIE continuum deserving of wholly different reconstructions (Strongbadian vs Strongmadian PIE), which the mainstream reconstruction doesn’t bother to do. So I ended up having to trudge through material that is bogged down in features that didn’t exist at the time I wanted to split my language off from the whole.

(Granted, good data for this sort of thing is even harder to come by than the usual, and historical linguistics is an extremely slow-to-adapt field).

It does not help, and this one is entirely on me, that I was using Wikipedia for most of my research: Wikipedia’s PIE pages are abyssmal. Outdated, contradictory, poorly-written and inadequately explained, they will teach you the wrong things and then you will have to waste a considerable amount of time unlearning all the horseshit. Don’t do what I did.

1.2 Brief List of Sources

I’ll have a longer writeup later on down the line: the bulk of my inspiration thus part has come from the work of Martin Kümmel, Andrew Byrd (he made Wenja for Far Cry Primal), Paul Kiparsky (primarily for his Compositional Theory), the blogs Paleoglot (Glen Gordon), PhDniX’s Blog (PhoeniX), and protouralic.wordpress (J Pystynen), some random bullshit I found on reddit, and The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World by Mallory & Adams. I'll try and update this as I continue.


1.3 Core Premise & Design Principles

I am for the time being painting the speakers in broad strokes, and will have to be content with worldbuilding as I go.  
  • The speakers diverged from the main language continuity extremely early, leading to a language that doesn’t include many of the features later PIE stages are known for, and retains several major parts that were lost.
  • The point of divergence was sometime between █████ and ████ BC.
  • The speakers’ culture runs orthogonal to the patriarchal horse-based murder that characterized much of the later PIE culture group(s), and they may or may not have even remained in this world.
  • I am not going to worry overmuch about where the vocabulary comes from, at least not at the moment; while I will try to stick to words with more solid / widespread attestation, some might time travel to before their invention.
  • The rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

The early point of divergence gives me some guidelines to follow with the actual content of the grammar: it’s going to retain features that were lost entirely in other branches (or only survived as scattered and unproductive archaisms), and it’s going to sidestep the development of some signature features of later stages of the family. As of right now, that’s going to include:
  • The laryngeal consonants (which are not actually laryngeals) are retained.
  • Active-stative alignment rather than nominative-accusative alignment
  • No grammatical gender; animate / inanimate distinction is only semantic at this point, not morphological.
  • No thematic endings (or at least not in the way they are typically reconstructed.)
  • Pre-syncope - This language is set before the stress-based syncope obliterated most of the vowels in the Great Dying / Vowel Mass Extinction / Schwapocalypse / the Fuckening.
  • No ablaut - or at the very least, I’m going with Paul Kiparsky’s Compositional Theory if I need to, because I can grok it much easier.
  • No vowels in hiatus - This is pretty well established in PIE, vowels that are next to each other either merge into a long vowel, have a glide inserted between them, or turn into a glide.
  • No geminate consonants - Also well established in PIE.
  • Everything's got to start with a consonant, but that includes the glottal stop so it's basically cheating - this is in line with modern ideas of root constraints, though for my purposes roots don't also have to end with a consonant.

Don’t worry if you don’t have a fucking clue what I am talking about here, we’ll get to it eventually.

Principle 0: Art over accuracy
As I said in part 0, accuracy is a mug’s game in historical linguistics. I’ve aimed for the sweet spot of “coherent enough to make sense” and “I personally like it”, with the latter taking priority in cases where I need to decide. This is an art project based on half-baked amateur linguistics and the power of Pattern Recognition, nothing more. (To be honest, I had to enforce this principle on myself just to stop the what-if rabbit-holing and decision paralysis.)

Principle 1: The Two-Step Plan
I want to do two distinct stages of this language: the one I’m going to be describing here is the older of the two, which is intended to be pretty close to the core Strongbadian PIE dialect. The later one is where we go off the rails.

Principle 2: Areal features yes, macrofamilies no
There was absolutely cultural and linguistic exchange going on between the peoples of east Europe / west Asia: that does not mean that their languages are connected via descent from a shared origin. I will pillage loan words and grammatical features from Proto-Kartvelian, Proto-Caucasian, Proto-Uralic, and Proto-Semitic if I think there’s something neat, but I’m not designing this conlang to align with the Indo-Uralic, Pontic, or Nostratic theories (note: these are all varying levels of fringe, and I only recommend looting them for creative purposes.)

Principle 3: Crank Credits
Sometimes the cranks have a good idea or two; these will be called out with the cashing in of a Crank Credit™. I don’t expect many of them, because the reasonable ideas are few and far between and the entertainingly bonkers ones are somehow even rarer. (I did find one guy I found who somehow managed to turn recon!PIE into Earthsea magic, though it is not as cool or useful as you would hope.)

(Fun fact: there is absolutely no requirement whatsoever for anything uploaded to Academia.edu to have any connection to an institution of higher learning or a peer-reviewed publication.)
 
Principle 4: Moderation in laryngeals
I am going into this project with the presumption that zealous reconstructioneers overuse laryngeals as an inconsistency-solving tool. *h₂ cannot possibly be that common and be a single phoneme, that’d make what is probably a uvular fricative the second or third most common consonant in the language and that is bonkers.

Principle 5: *a definitely existed
We’ll get to this one. 

Principle 6: Symbol Usage
I will be marking normal reconstructions with the usual asterisk like *so, and I will mark my own bespoke Pre-PIE reconstructions with two **asterisks. This will be strictly in reference to explaining how things from my version of recon!PIE changed to get to traditional recon!PIE.

 X < Y means “X derived from Y”; X  > Y means “X turns into Y”

I promise this is the end of the set up.

2. *h₁n̥gʷnís

First and most important thing (I'm really saying that a lot, aren't I): this isn’t actually one of the PIE words for fire; This is a formula representing one of the PIE words for fire. Think of every letter here as an algebraic variable that, if you apply the right sequence of functions to it, will become words like Sanskrit agni and Latin ignis. If you had a time machine, popped into a settlement of Eurasian steppe nomads, pointed at the campfire and said “*h₁n̥gʷnís!” you’d get some very strange looks but if the reconstruction is solid the confused steppe nomads would probably figure out that you meant “fire” and correct your gods-awful pronunciation.

(Granted, that’s dependent on them being from one of the dialects that used *h₁n̥gʷnís in the first place: it’s the less common of the two.)

2.1.1: Basic Structure

*h₁n̥gʷnís can be broken down into component parts:
  • h₁engʷ- ; a root with a general meaning of “to burn” or “fire”.
  •  -n- ; An extension added to the root of entirely unknown function: it’s here in *h₁n̥gʷnís, but missing from the related *h₁óngʷl̥ (“charcoal” or “embers”). It might be part of the suffix?
  • -i- ; A suffix that makes animate nouns out of verbs or adjectives.
  • -s ; The nominative singular case ending


2.1.2: h₁

Starting off strong we get one of the mystery laryngeal consonants; these are sounds (that are not actually laryngeals) that were lost in all IE languages (save the Anatolian languages, a few edge cases in Iranian and Albanian, and this weird thing called the Triple Reflex in Greek) but we know that they were there because they influenced nearby vowels (and sometimes consonants). There are normally three laryngeals reconstructed, sometimes four, but some people have gone as low as 1 (highly unlikely) and as high as 10 or 12 (also unlikely, but less unlikely when framed as h₁, h₂, and h₃  encompassing multiple sounds each)

h₁ is the easy one, because it doesn’t have much going for it: it lengthened vowels, it didn’t have any coloring effect on *e (the others did, more on that eventually), it sometimes turned into e in Greek, and it vanished in all descendents (including Anatolian). Nearly all reconstructioneers plug it in as either *h or *ʔ, since those sounds fit all the criteria: I’m going to be going with the glottal stop ʔ (for the time being, stick a pin in that).

Word Progress: ʔ-


2.1.3: n̥

That little dot means that this is a syllabic resonant - a consonant that can serve as the nucleus of a syllable in place of a vowel. English has them all over the place (It’s why “little” is two syllables) and they’re not particularly difficult to wrangle. Syllabic consonants are almost always the result of a nearby vowel being reduced and / or deleted, and we can clearly see that the root h₁engʷ- has a vowel in it: this is an example of ablaut, which is when vowels change and carry different meanings when they do (English sing-sang-sung is an example of ablaut).

In this case, since the stress is on the *í, the *e got reduced/deleted because there was a resonant to pick up the slack. But since my language doesn’t have stress-based deletion as part of ablaut, it’s going to stay as **en.

Vowels in PIE reconstructions are a 50 gallon drum of worms that I am going to save for another time: for now, I am going to say that *e isn’t actually /e/ most of the time, and was probably closer to the ɛ, ə, ɐ, or æ - something weakly pronounced and a bit forward in the mouth. I’ll just be representing it with <a> for now because I’ll need a separate schwa in the next step and haven't fully decided on how the low vowels will pan out.

Word progress: ʔan-


2.1.4: gʷ

This one is going to be a tricky one, despite looking relatively normal. It’s got two prominent distinctive features, but they’re a lot more questionable than what’s come before. As reconstructed, *gʷ is:
  • Voiced, contrasting with unvoiced *kʷ and breathy voiced *gʷʰ
  • Labialized velar (pronounced with rounded lips), contrasting with plain *g and palatovelar *ǵ.
The problem is that both the plain voiced (*D Series) and the velar (*Ḱ *K and *Kʷ series) categories are suspect, and we get into the quote unquote fun of historical linguistics - the variables used in the reconstruction are only ever best guesses, sometimes new data makes old best guesses less best, and it takes an extremely and unfortunately long time for the traditional way of writing and talking about things to change to reflect that new data.

To whit: The three-way voiceless-voiced-breathy voiced (*T, *D, *Dʰ series) distinction in the stop consonants is so rare in the modern day that the number of comparable languages is in single-digits. This has led some reconstructioneers to theorize that the *D series was something else entirely, usually some kind of glottalized voiceless consonant (this is called Glottalic Theory), to account for why they are so infrequent in the corpus, why they never appear twice in the same root when *DʰeDʰ is extremely common, and why there is basically no *b at all except weird edge cases that might be errors or loanwords.

I’m going to cash in one of my Crank Credits™ and go with Allan Bomhard’s version of Glottalic Theory: the traditional *D series behaved similarly to glottalic consonants in Coast Tsimshian / Sm'algya̱x. Glottalization occurs on whatever side the vowel is on (leaning towards stressed vowel if between two), and is unreleased word-finally.

(Bomhard, as a rule, is not a reliable source: his whole deal is trying to reconstruct a protolanguage macrofamily ("Nostratic") that encompasses basically every language in Eurasia, and you can probably see the issue with making a reconstruction based on other reconstructions and claiming that it’s reflective of reality. His work is impressively thorough, methodologically whack, and would be better served if it was an elaborate art project. That said, in his efforts to make a Grand Unified Theory he cites basically everything anyone has ever written about the subject and entertains basically any idea that could even tangentially fit.)

So instead of *gʷ, I’m going with **k’ʷ, but this leads us to a second problem: it’s pretty weird for a labialized ejective to be stuck between two other consonants. (*-n̥-, since it acts like a vowel, is less weird in this regard, but since I’m working with a stage that doesn’t have *-n̥-, that’s not an option.)

Here’s where saying “fuck it, we ball” is very handy. Labialized consonants are pronounced with lip-rounding, and they are typically formed when a rounded vowel like /o/ or /u/ carries over to the preceding consonant. This is the extremely common process of assimilation which boils down to “brain makes one sound closer to a nearby sound to make it easier to say.”

Tugging on that thread (we are outside of normal reconstruction and fully into the art project weeds now), I’m going to stick a schwa in there, representing an unstressed **u that got reduced during the Vowel Mass Extinction and then obliterated in the Schwapocalypse (also called syncope) but left behind its roundedness on the **k’.

(This theory I am pulling primarily from the long-abandoned Paleoglot blog by Glen Gordon and his “Diachrony of Pre-PIE” document which was saved from oblivion by an automated Scribd web trawler. It has some significant issues that I have already run into trying to prep the next post, so I’m including it here because I like it and I can make it work for the time being - we’ll see how it turns out in the future.)

Now we are fully into the weeds and have three different versions of the word: pre- Extinction (reduction of unstressed high vowels to schwa), and then pre- and post- apocalyptic (deletion of schwa)

Word progress (Pre-Extinction): ʔank’u-
Word progress (Pre-Schwapocalpyse): ʔank’ʷə-
Word progress (Post-Schwapocalypse): ʔank’ʷ-


2.1.5: n

After all that mess, *n is just **n. Nasal consonants are anomalously well-behaved in reconstructed!PIE. There’s no indication of what this might have meant, if it meant anything at all, though there are other instances of *n getting slapped onto the end of words so maybe later we’ll see something that can give us a clue.

Word progress (Pre-Extinction): ʔank’un-
Word progress (Pre-Schwapocalpyse): ʔank’ʷən-
Word progress (Post-Schwapocalypse): ʔank’ʷn-


2.1.6: í

*i and *u are weird, because reconstructioners treat them as syllabic versions of *y and *w, working the same way as *-n̥- did above. They normally get written as *ey and *ew when stressed, *i and *u / *y and *w when unstressed, but as you’ve probably noticed by now, this here is a stressed *i. Exceptions to rules are everywhere, especially in old words, but that actually works in our favor.

While the “*i is just syllabic *y and the unstressed form of *ey” works for the background formula level of PIE chicanery, for my purposes there is a much simpler function I want to use: that at some point in the history of PIE, stressed high vowels (**i and **u) broke into the diphthongs **ay and **aw (or **əy and **əw - I’ll figure that out when we get there), and then when ablaut stress changes were applied we ended up with the syllabic *y and *w.

This is way too many words to say “*i is just **i for the purposes of this conlang”.

Word progress (Pre-Extinction): ʔank’uni-
Word progress (Pre-Schwapocalpyse): ʔank’ʷəni-
Word progress (Post-Schwapocalypse): ʔank’ʷni-


2.1.7: s

This was probably pronounced closer to /z/, since /s/ commonly voices after stressed vowels or voiced consonants (again, super common in English), but there didn’t seem to be a meaningful distinction between the two in recon!PIE: it’s just *s, nothing weird there.

Except there is something weird, it’s just grammatical instead of phonological - *s appears all over noun endings in PIE, to the point of being weird, but this post has gone on long enough without me going into a digression about why I think this happened just right now. To bullet-points it:

  • It’s typologically unusual for nominative-accusative languages to explicitly mark the subject of a sentence, but you do find this sort of thing in languages that make a distinction between the subject of an intransitive verb and the agent of a transitive verb.
  • PIE neuter nouns use the accusative case ending (*-m) for the nominative, which is another indication that we’re dealing with something that descended from an older system that cared about agency / animacy: since a rock isn’t animate it would never be the agent, and thus it would always use the ending for the patient of a verb, and this carried over through the switch to NOM-ACC.
  • The singular nominative demonstrative pronoun, *so, (“this, that”) is weirdly out of place - every other form in its declension table (all the non-NOM cases and every single plural form) begins with *t, not *s.

All put together we get a theory (that I did not make up myself) that the NOM.sing ending *-s is the leftovers of **sə, which is the reduced form of *so (which for vowel reasons I will write as **sɑ for now and explain later), which was originally **tɑ.

Now, to get all that working properly I have to add several more steps to our sequence and rename the ones we have. Here I’m going to shift over into directly describing

  • Starting Point: ʔank’uni tɑ
  • High Vowel Collapse + Labialization: ʔank’ʷəni tɑ
  • Agglutination Dance: ʔank’ʷənitɑ
  • Final vowel reduction: ʔank’ʷənítə
  • Schwapocalpyse: ʔank’ʷnit
  • Spirantization of final *t: ʔank’ʷnis
  • a > e shift: ʔenk’ʷnis
  • Ablaut Deletions: ʔn̥k’ʷnís
  • Glottalized > creaky voice:ʔn̥g̰ʷnís
  • Creaky voice to plain voiced: ʔn̥gʷnís
  • Laryngeal Loss: n̥gʷnís

And bing-bang boom we have a timeline of (hypothetical) changes from Early PIE to Late PIE that I can add to and adjust as I need to later on. I had to run my functions backwards in time, which is a bit awkward, but now I can just pick a stage and say “here’s where my language broke off”. Then I can just apply all those steps in reverse to any reconstructed word and add more granularity and more steps as needed.

Going forward, I think I am going to split off shortly after the Great Vowel Collapse, to get all those fun labialized consonants. More on that later.


3. Dictionary Entry

  • ʔan.k’u.ní (AN): wildfire; uncontrolled blaze; a fire that is particularly intense, destructive, uncontrollable, or fast-spreading.

4. Conclusion

For those of you who I haven’t chased off yet with all this nonsense, let me know if you’d like to see more. The density will trail off after I get more of my personal reconstruction established, but for the next few follow up words there’s still a good chunk of material to cover; I haven’t even gotten to rant about *h₂ yet.

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