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47-574: The name of the river is from a Proto-Indo-European root *nr primarily associated with water (compare Neretva , Neris , Ner and Nur ) or from a Lithuanian language verb nerti associated primarily with diving and flood . The portion of the river between the junctions with the Western Bug and the Vistula is also known as the Bugonarew, Narwio-Bug, Narwo-Bug, Bugo-Narew, Narwiobug or Narwobug. At

94-535: A French Jesuit who spent most of his life in India, had specifically demonstrated the analogy between Sanskrit and European languages. According to current academic consensus, Jones's famous work of 1786 was less accurate than his predecessors', as he erroneously included Egyptian , Japanese and Chinese in the Indo-European languages, while omitting Hindi . In 1818, Danish linguist Rasmus Christian Rask elaborated

141-659: A PIE homeland, the Kurgan and Anatolian hypotheses are the ones most widely accepted, and also the ones most debated against each other. Following the publication of several studies on ancient DNA in 2015, Colin Renfrew, the original author and proponent of the Anatolian hypothesis, has accepted the reality of migrations of populations speaking one or several Indo-European languages from the Pontic steppe towards Northwestern Europe. The table lists

188-544: A conventional mark of reconstructed words, such as * wódr̥ , * ḱwn̥tós , or * tréyes ; these forms are the reconstructed ancestors of the modern English words water , hound , and three , respectively. No direct evidence of PIE exists; scholars have reconstructed PIE from its present-day descendants using the comparative method . For example, compare the pairs of words in Italian and English: piede and foot , padre and father , pesce and fish . Since there

235-453: A detailed, though conservative, overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated by 1959. Jerzy Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophonie gave a better understanding of Indo-European ablaut . From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became robust enough to establish its relationship to PIE. Scholars have proposed multiple hypotheses about when, where, and by whom PIE was spoken. The Kurgan hypothesis , first put forward in 1956 by Marija Gimbutas , has become

282-406: A different language do not reflect the phylogeny to be tested, and, if used, will detract from the compatibility. Getting the right dataset for the comparative method is a major task in historical linguistics. Some universally accepted proto-languages are Proto-Afroasiatic , Proto-Indo-European , Proto-Uralic , and Proto-Dravidian . In a few fortuitous instances, which have been used to verify

329-411: A language to change, and "[as] a result, our reconstructions tend to have a strong bias toward the average language type known to the investigator." Such an investigator finds themselves blinkered by their own linguistic frame of reference . The advent of the wave model raised new issues in the domain of linguistic reconstruction, causing the reevaluation of old reconstruction systems and depriving

376-606: A language. From the 1870s, the Neogrammarians proposed that sound laws have no exceptions, as illustrated by Verner's law , published in 1876, which resolved apparent exceptions to Grimm's law by exploring the role of accent (stress) in language change. 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

423-485: A mother language. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache ( pronounced [ˈuːɐ̯ʃpʁaːxə] ; from ur- 'primordial', 'original' + Sprache 'language') is used instead. It is also sometimes called the common or primitive form of a language (e.g. Common Germanic , Primitive Norse ). In the strict sense, a proto-language is the most recent common ancestor of a language family, immediately before

470-597: A thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis , the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of eastern Europe. The linguistic reconstruction of PIE has provided insight into the pastoral culture and patriarchal religion of its speakers. As speakers of Proto-Indo-European became isolated from each other through the Indo-European migrations ,

517-422: Is a consistent correspondence of the initial consonants ( p and f ) that emerges far too frequently to be coincidental, one can infer that these languages stem from a common parent language . Detailed analysis suggests a system of sound laws to describe the phonetic and phonological changes from the hypothetical ancestral words to the modern ones. These laws have become so detailed and reliable as to support

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564-667: Is attested only fragmentarily. There are no objective criteria for the evaluation of different reconstruction systems yielding different proto-languages. Many researchers concerned with linguistic reconstruction agree that the traditional comparative method is an "intuitive undertaking." The bias of the researchers regarding the accumulated implicit knowledge can also lead to erroneous assumptions and excessive generalization. Kortlandt (1993) offers several examples in where such general assumptions concerning "the nature of language" hindered research in historical linguistics. Linguists make personal judgements on how they consider "natural" for

611-567: Is believed to have had an elaborate system of morphology that included inflectional suffixes (analogous to English child, child's, children, children's ) as well as ablaut (vowel alterations, as preserved in English sing, sang, sung, song ) and accent . PIE nominals and pronouns had a complex system of declension , and verbs similarly had a complex system of conjugation . The PIE phonology , particles , numerals , and copula are also well-reconstructed. Asterisks are used by linguists as

658-415: Is by definition a linguistic reconstruction formulated by applying the comparative method to a group of languages featuring similar characteristics. The tree is a statement of similarity and a hypothesis that the similarity results from descent from a common language. The comparative method, a process of deduction , begins from a set of characteristics, or characters, found in the attested languages. If

705-465: Is given to the hypotheses of highest compatibility. The differences in compatibility must be explained by various applications of the wave model . The level of completeness of the reconstruction achieved varies, depending on how complete the evidence is from the descendant languages and on the formulation of the characters by the linguists working on it. Not all characters are suitable for the comparative method. For example, lexical items that are loans from

752-474: Is not possible. Forming an exception, Phrygian is sufficiently well-attested to allow proposals of a particularly close affiliation with Greek, and a Graeco-Phrygian branch of Indo-European is becoming increasingly accepted. Proto-Indo-European phonology has been reconstructed in some detail. Notable features of the most widely accepted (but not uncontroversial) reconstruction include: The vowels in commonly used notation are: Proto-language In

799-647: Is termed "Pre-X", as in Pre–Old Japanese. It is also possible to apply internal reconstruction to a proto-language, obtaining a pre-proto-language, such as Pre-Proto-Indo-European. Both prefixes are sometimes used for an unattested stage of a language without reference to comparative or internal reconstruction. "Pre-X" is sometimes also used for a postulated substratum , as in the Pre-Indo-European languages believed to have been spoken in Europe and South Asia before

846-424: Is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family . No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language , and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during

893-549: The Indian subcontinent became aware of similarities between Indo-Iranian languages and European languages, and as early as 1653, Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn had published a proposal for a proto-language ("Scythian") for the following language families: Germanic , Romance , Greek , Baltic , Slavic , Celtic , and Iranian . In a memoir sent to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1767, Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux ,

940-576: The Neogrammarian hypothesis : the Indo-European sound laws apply without exception. William Jones , an Anglo-Welsh philologist and puisne judge in Bengal , caused an academic sensation when in 1786 he postulated the common ancestry of Sanskrit , Greek , Latin , Gothic , the Celtic languages , and Old Persian , but he was not the first to state such a hypothesis. In the 16th century, European visitors to

987-502: The confluence near Zegrze the Bug is 1.6x longer, drains a 1.4x larger basin, and has a slightly greater average discharge (158 m³/s at Wyszków vs 146 m³/s at Pułtusk for the Narew, both ~25 km above the junction). Thus the Bugonarew was often considered part of the Bug river and the Narew a right tributary of the Bug. On December 27, 1962, Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz abolished

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1034-429: The realist or the abstractionist position. Even the widely studied proto-languages, such as Proto-Indo-European , have drawn criticism for being outliers typologically with respect to the reconstructed phonemic inventory . The alternatives such as glottalic theory , despite representing a typologically less rare system, have not gained wider acceptance, and some researchers even suggest the use of indexes to represent

1081-410: The tree model of historical linguistics , a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family . Proto-languages are usually unattested, or partially attested at best. They are reconstructed by way of the comparative method . In the family tree metaphor, a proto-language can be called

1128-471: The 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE and its daughter languages , and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the comparative method ) were developed as a result. PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from approximately 4500 BCE to 2500 BCE during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age , though estimates vary by more than

1175-466: The Narew, Vistula (Wisła), and San rivers. On September 6, 1939, Polish military forces attempted to use the Narew as a defense line against German attack during the German invasion of Poland . This was abandoned the next day in favor of the Bug as German forces had already penetrated the defenses. The Battle of Wizna was fought along the banks of the river between September 7 and September 10, 1939, between

1222-558: The North Adriatic region are sometimes classified as Italic. Albanian and Greek are the only surviving Indo-European descendants of a Paleo-Balkan language area, named for their occurrence in or in the vicinity of the Balkan peninsula . Most of the other languages of this area—including Illyrian , Thracian , and Dacian —do not appear to be members of any other subfamilies of PIE, but are so poorly attested that proper classification of them

1269-622: The Pontic–Caspian steppe and into eastern Europe. Other theories include the Anatolian hypothesis , which posits that PIE spread out from Anatolia with agriculture beginning c. 7500–6000 BCE, the Armenian hypothesis , the Paleolithic continuity paradigm , and the indigenous Aryans theory. The last two of these theories are not regarded as credible within academia. Out of all the theories for

1316-517: The Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Kartvelian languages due to early language contact , as well as some morphological similarities—notably the Indo-European ablaut , which is remarkably similar to the root ablaut system reconstructible for Proto-Kartvelian. The Lusitanian language was a marginally attested language spoken in areas near the border between present-day Portugal and Spain . The Venetic and Liburnian languages known from

1363-679: The Soviet Army had reached the line of the rivers Narew, Bug River, Vistula and San – completing the division of Poland as negotiated in advance. Proto-Indo-European language Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European Proto-Indo-European ( PIE )

1410-604: The ancestor of the modern Scandinavian languages , is attested, albeit in fragmentary form, in the Elder Futhark . Although there are no very early Indo-Aryan inscriptions, the Indo-Aryan languages of modern India all go back to Vedic Sanskrit (or dialects very closely related to it), which has been preserved in texts accurately handed down by parallel oral and written traditions for many centuries. The first person to offer systematic reconstructions of an unattested proto-language

1457-424: The arrival there of Indo-European languages. When multiple historical stages of a single language exist, the oldest attested stage is normally termed "Old X" (e.g. Old English and Old Japanese ). In other cases, such as Old Irish and Old Norse , the term refers to the language of the oldest known significant texts. Each of these languages has an older stage ( Primitive Irish and Proto-Norse respectively) that

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1504-588: The common origin of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German. In 1833, he began publishing the Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend , Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic, and German . In 1822, Jacob Grimm formulated what became known as Grimm's law as a general rule in his Deutsche Grammatik . Grimm showed correlations between the Germanic and other Indo-European languages and demonstrated that sound change systematically transforms all words of

1551-475: The disputed series of plosives. On the other end of the spectrum, Pulgram (1959 :424) suggests that Proto-Indo-European reconstructions are just "a set of reconstructed formulae" and "not representative of any reality". In the same vein, Julius Pokorny in his study on Indo-European , claims that the linguistic term IE parent language is merely an abstraction, which does not exist in reality and should be understood as consisting of dialects possibly dating back to

1598-577: The effects of hypothetical sounds which no longer exist in all languages documented prior to the excavation of cuneiform tablets in Anatolian. This theory was first proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1879 on the basis of internal reconstruction only, and progressively won general acceptance after Jerzy Kuryłowicz 's discovery of consonantal reflexes of these reconstructed sounds in Hittite. Julius Pokorny 's Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch ('Indo-European Etymological Dictionary', 1959) gave

1645-501: The entire set can be accounted for by descent from the proto-language, which must contain the proto-forms of them all, the tree, or phylogeny, is regarded as a complete explanation and by Occam's razor , is given credibility. More recently, such a tree has been termed "perfect" and the characters labelled "compatible". No trees but the smallest branches are ever found to be perfect, in part because languages also evolve through horizontal transfer with their neighbours. Typically, credibility

1692-418: The family started to diverge into the attested daughter languages . It is therefore equivalent with the ancestral language or parental language of a language family. Moreover, a group of lects that are not considered separate languages, such as the members of a dialect cluster , may also be described as descending from a unitary proto-language. Typically, the proto-language is not known directly. It

1739-508: The forces of Poland and Germany during the initial stages of Invasion of Poland. Because it consisted of a small force holding a piece of fortified territory against a vastly larger invasion for three days at great cost before being annihilated with no known survivors, Wizna is sometimes referred to as a Polish Thermopylae in Polish culture. On September 17, 1939, the USSR invaded Poland. By 28 September,

1786-718: The geographical region of Europe known as the Wysoczyzny Podlasko – Bialoruskie (English: Plateau of Podlasie and Belarus) located within the Podlaskie Voivodeship and Masovian Voivodeship of Poland and the Hrodna Voblast of Belarus . The Narew is the fifth longest Polish river . On August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact , agreeing to divide Poland along

1833-654: The main Indo-European language families, comprising the languages descended from Proto-Indo-European. Slavic: Russian , Ukrainian , Belarusian , Polish , Czech , Slovak , Sorbian , Serbo-Croatian , Bulgarian , Slovenian , Macedonian , Kashubian , Rusyn Iranic: Persian , Pashto , Balochi , Kurdish , Zaza , Ossetian , Luri , Talyshi , Tati , Gilaki , Mazandarani , Semnani , Yaghnobi ; Nuristani Commonly proposed subgroups of Indo-European languages include Italo-Celtic , Graeco-Aryan , Graeco-Armenian , Graeco-Phrygian , Daco-Thracian , and Thraco-Illyrian . There are numerous lexical similarities between

1880-528: The method and the model (and probably ultimately inspired it ), a literary history exists from as early as a few millennia ago, allowing the descent to be traced in detail. The early daughter languages, and even the proto-language itself, may be attested in surviving texts. For example, Latin is the proto-language of the Romance language family, which includes such modern languages as French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan and Spanish. Likewise, Proto-Norse ,

1927-524: The most popular. It proposes that the original speakers of PIE were the Yamnaya culture associated with the kurgans (burial mounds) on the Pontic–Caspian steppe north of the Black Sea. According to the theory, they were nomadic pastoralists who domesticated the horse , which allowed them to migrate across Europe and Asia in wagons and chariots. By the early 3rd millennium BCE, they had expanded throughout

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1974-599: The name Bugonarew soon after the Zegrze Reservoir had been constructed. Since then the river Bug has officially been considered part of the river Narew's system, with the Bug being a left tributary of the Narew (by this classification, the River Narew is a right tributary of the River Vistula). The name Bugonarew however is still used, especially by the inhabitants of local towns, such as Pułtusk. The Narew flows through

2021-426: The proto-Indo-European language. By the early 1900s, Indo-Europeanists had developed well-defined descriptions of PIE which scholars still accept today. Later, the discovery of the Anatolian and Tocharian languages added to the corpus of descendant languages. A subtle new principle won wide acceptance: the laryngeal theory , which explained irregularities in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European phonology as

2068-499: The proto-language of its "uniform character." This is evident in Karl Brugmann 's skepticism that the reconstruction systems could ever reflect a linguistic reality. Ferdinand de Saussure would even express a more certain opinion, completely rejecting a positive specification of the sound values of reconstruction systems. In general, the issue of the nature of proto-language remains unresolved, with linguists generally taking either

2115-428: The regional dialects of Proto-Indo-European spoken by the various groups diverged, as each dialect underwent shifts in pronunciation (the Indo-European sound laws ), morphology, and vocabulary. Over many centuries, these dialects transformed into the known ancient Indo-European languages. From there, further linguistic divergence led to the evolution of their current descendants, the modern Indo-European languages. PIE

2162-708: The set of correspondences in his prize essay Undersøgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse ('Investigation of the Origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language'), where he argued that Old Norse was related to the Germanic languages, and had even suggested a relation to the Baltic, Slavic, Greek, Latin and Romance languages. In 1816, Franz Bopp published On the System of Conjugation in Sanskrit , in which he investigated

2209-405: Was August Schleicher ; he did so for Proto-Indo-European in 1861. Normally, the term "Proto-X" refers to the last common ancestor of a group of languages, occasionally attested but most commonly reconstructed through the comparative method , as with Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic . An earlier stage of a single language X, reconstructed through the method of internal reconstruction ,

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