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The meaning of a reconstructed root is conventionally that of a verb; the terms root and verbal root are almost synonymous in PIE grammar. [citation needed] This is because, apart from a limited number of so-called root nouns, PIE roots overwhelmingly participate in verbal inflection through well-established morphological and phonological ...
On the other hand, athematic nouns and verbs usually had mobile accent, with varied between strong forms, with root accent and full grade in the root (e.g. the singular active of verbs, and the nominative and accusative of nouns), and weak forms, with ending accent and zero grade in the root (e.g. the plural active and all forms of the middle ...
They were used to derive related words (cf. the English root "-friend-", from which are derived related words such as friendship, friendly, befriend, and newly coined words such as unfriend). As a rule, roots were monosyllabic, and had the structure (s)(C)CVC(C), where the symbols C stand for consonants, V stands for a variable vowel, and ...
For English, a modern English cognate is given when it exists, along with the corresponding Old English form; otherwise, only an Old English form is given. For Gothic, a form in another Germanic language (Old Norse; Old High German; or Middle High German) is sometimes given in its place or in addition, when it reveals important features.
By late PIE, however, as the aspect system evolved, the need had arisen for verbs of a different aspect than that of the root. Several of the formations, which originally formed distinct verbs, gradually came to be used as "aspect switching" derivations, whose primary purpose was to create a verb of one aspect from a root of another aspect.
All except the Latin form suggest a masculine u-stem with non-ablauting PIE root *ǵen-, but certain irregularities (the position of the accent, the unexpected feminine ā-stem form in Latin, the unexpected Gothic stem kinn-< ǵenw-, the ablaut found in Greek gnáthos 'jaw' < PIE *ǵnHdʰ-, Lithuanian žándas 'jawbone' < *ǵonHdʰ-os) suggest ...
The *kʷetwóres rule of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is a sound law of PIE accent, stating that in a word of three syllables é-o-X the accent will be moved to the penultimate, e-ó-X. It has been observed by earlier scholars, but it was only in the 1980s that it attracted enough attention to be named, probably first by Helmut Rix in 1985.
This is similar to modern languages; compare English He is above in the attic (adverb) and The bird is above the house (preposition). The postpositions became prepositions in the daughter languages except Anatolian , Indo-Iranian and Sabellic ; some of the other branches such as Latin and Greek preserve postpositions vestigially.