Jan 12, 2017 · Most of the information about Proto-Indo-European that I've used in this answer comes from "Foreign elements in the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary" by Rasmus Gudmundsen Bjørn (2017). He compiles a large number of proposed or potential cognates between PIE and Afroasiatic/Sumerian, along with the Uralic and Caucasian languages.

Sep 9, 2024 · Some restrictions will be more common than others, but those restrictions will also most likely be more common outside Indo-European (e.g., disallowing initial clusters like /lk/ or /kg/ is near-universal in Indo-European languages, but probably as near-universal globally). –

Mar 30, 2016 · What is the relationship of Proto-Indo-European, Indo-European, Proto-Germanic and Germanic? 0 Is there a reason germanic languages are more different from other PIE languages?

Jul 20, 2017 · As several others have said, older languages like Hittite, Sanskrit, Avestan, Greek, and Latin definitely have more in common with Proto-Indo-European (PIE) as they are not removed as far from the ancestral source in time, and also because PIE was mostly reconstructed in their image. A more interesting question to ask is which modern (still ...

Mar 10, 2024 · It’s called Indo-European because when it was first discovered that Indic and Iranian languages were related to European ones, the name coined for the newly-discovered family was based on its geographical expanse – it basically means ‘spanning from [the western border of] Europe in the west all the way to [the eastern border of] India in the east’.

Generally, all Indo-European Anatolian languages had some kind of agglutinative qualities, apparently because of the substratum languages that were agglutinative e.g. Hattic and Hurrian. Nevetheless, that does not qualify them as agglutinative in the same sense as Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Basque, Berber and so on.

Oct 13, 2017 · The difference between modern English and the gender system in most Indo-European languages (including Old English) is that English has replaced “conventional” gender by “natural” gender, reinterpreting all inanimate nouns as neuter. This is different from the situation in Persian etc., where the personal pronouns are invariable for gender.

Oct 29, 2019 · But, there was a system called Linear A that was used from 1800 to 1250 BC. The Rigveda was written around 1500 BC. This means that, unless texts of Proto Indo-European itself were found or something older than this (prob. Anatolian), if the hypothesis that these are Indo-European languages is true, this could be right.

Even so, old indo-european languages do seem to have rather complex rules, incorporating many seemingly different lexical forms, about noun inflection and verb conjugation, making them perhaps in a real sense "harder" to learn than agglutinative languages. I'll try to address why by pasting together some hypotheses and some facts.

Jun 6, 2021 · The periphrastic 'have'-perfect isn't a feature common to the Indo-European languages, but rather one that's part of the Standard Average European Sprachbund, which developed as the various European languages came into closer contact, first through the Roman Empire and then through the various migrations and the general wider trade of the Middle Ages.