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August Schleicher's A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages (1874–77) represented an early attempt to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language. [16] By the early 1900s, Indo-Europeanists had developed well-defined descriptions of PIE which scholars still accept today.
Proto-Indo-European nominals include nouns, adjectives, and pronouns. Their grammatical forms and meanings have been reconstructed by modern linguists, based on similarities found across all Indo-European languages. This article discusses nouns and adjectives; Proto-Indo-European pronouns are treated elsewhere.
The grammar of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is reconstructed from those of its daughter languages known in the late 19th century. The work represents a major step in Indo-European studies, after Franz Bopp's Comparative Grammar of 1833 and August Schleicher's Compendium of 1871.
Verbs are given in their "dictionary form". The exact form given depends on the specific language: For the Germanic languages and for Welsh, the infinitive is given. For Latin, the Baltic languages, and the Slavic languages, the first-person singular present indicative is given, with the infinitive supplied in parentheses.
The proposed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became certain enough to establish its relationship to PIE.
Proto-Indo-European verbs reflect a complex system of morphology, more complicated than the substantive, with verbs categorized according to their aspect [a], using multiple grammatical moods and voices, and being conjugated according to person, number and tense. In addition to finite forms thus formed, non-finite forms such as participles are ...
The comparative method developed out of attempts to reconstruct the proto-language mentioned by Jones, which he did not name but subsequent linguists have labelled Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The first professional comparison between the Indo-European languages that were then known was made by the German linguist Franz Bopp in 1816.
The copula is the most irregular verb in many Indo-European languages. This is partly because it is more frequently used than any other, and partly because Proto-Indo-European offered more than one verb suitable for use in these functions, with the result that the daughter languages, in different ways, have tended to form suppletive verb paradigms.