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Concept
Proto-Indo-European nominals
Summary
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 Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) had eight or nine cases, three numbers (singular, dual and plural) and probably originally two genders (animate and neuter), with the animate later splitting into the masculine and the feminine.
Nominals fell into multiple different declensions. Most of them had word stems ending in a consonant (called athematic stems) and exhibited a complex pattern of accent shifts and/or vowel changes (ablaut) among the different cases.
Two declensions ended in a vowel () and are called thematic; they were more regular and became more common during the history of PIE and its older daughter languages.
PIE very frequently derived nominals from verbs. Just as English giver and gift are ultimately related to the verb give, 'giver' and 'gift' are derived from 'to give', but the practice was much more common in PIE. For example, 'foot' was derived from 'to tread', and 'house' from 'to build'.
The basic structure of Proto-Indo-European nouns and adjectives was the same as that of PIE verbs. A lexical word (as would appear in a dictionary) was formed by adding a suffix () onto a root () to form a stem. The word was then inflected by adding an ending () to the stem.
The root indicates a basic concept, often a verb (e.g. 'give'), while the stem carries a more specific nominal meaning based on the combination of root and suffix (e.g. 'giver', 'gift'). Some stems cannot clearly be broken up into root and suffix altogether, as in 'bear'.
The ending carries grammatical information, including case, number, and gender. Gender is an inherent property of a noun but is part of the inflection of an adjective, because it must agree with the gender of the noun it modifies.
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