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Proto-Indo-European pronouns have been reconstructed by modern linguists, based on similarities found across all Indo-European languages. This article lists and discusses the hypothesised forms. Proto-Indo-European (PIE) pronouns, especially demonstrative pronouns, are difficult to reconstruct because of their variety in later languages.
The following conventions are used: Cognates are in general given in the oldest well-documented language of each family, although forms in modern languages are given for families in which the older stages of the languages are poorly documented or do not differ significantly from the modern languages.
PIE very frequently derived nominals from verbs. Just as English giver and gift are ultimately related to the verb give, *déh₃tors 'giver' and *déh₃nom 'gift' are derived from *deh₃-'to give', but the practice was much more common in PIE. For example, *pṓds 'foot' was derived from *ped-'to tread', and *dómh₂s 'house' from *demh₂ ...
PIE had personal pronouns in the first and second grammatical person, but not the third person, where demonstrative pronouns were used instead. The personal pronouns had their own unique forms and endings, and some had two distinct stems; this is most obvious in the first person singular where the two stems are still preserved in English I and me.
This rule was no longer productive in late PIE, and many potential examples were restored by analogy. For example, the genitive singular of neuter nouns in -men-is reconstructed as -mén-s rather than -mḗn. It was grammaticalised for the nominative singulars of nouns ending in a sonorant, as well as the nominoaccusative of neuter collectives.
Neopronouns are much more rare than "he," "she," or "they," so when we talk about common neopronouns, we’re still talking about a miniscule sliver of the pronoun pie. However, there are still ...
(See the morphology of the Proto-Indo-European noun for some examples.) This can hold even for roots that are often translated as nouns: *ped-, for example, can mean 'to tread' or 'foot', depending on the ablaut grade and ending. Some noun stems like *h₂egʷn-o-'lamb', however, do not derive from known verbal roots. [7]
The a-stems descended from the PIE thematic inflection and were by far the most common type of noun in Proto-Germanic. [2] Although they could originally be any gender in PIE (as could be seen in Latin), in Proto-Germanic they were restricted to either masculine (ending in -az) or neuter (ending in -ą). The two genders differed only in the ...