język: Indo-European languages

Evidence: 65 • authority: 72

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European has been discovered; 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. The majority of linguistic work during 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…

Evidence: 53 • authority: 72

Proto-Indo-European society is the reconstructed culture of Proto-Indo-Europeans, the ancient speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language, ancestor of all modern Indo-European languages. Historical linguistics combined with archaeological and genetic evidence have provided the current basis for understanding the culture and its people. The most widely accepted theory suggests that the culture emerged on the Pontic–Caspian steppe after 5000 BCE, a period known as the Chalcolithic, where smelted copper and stone tools were in use simultaneously. Proto-Indo-European speakers are considered to have been semi-nomadic, but domestication of cattle, first for ritual sacrifice and later for consump…

Evidence: 47 • authority: 72

The Proto-Indo-Europeans are a postulated prehistoric ethnolinguistic group of Eurasia who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Knowledge of them comes chiefly from that linguistic reconstruction, along with material evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics. The Proto-Indo-Europeans likely lived during the Late Neolithic to Chalcolithic (6400 to 3500 BC). Mainstream scholars place them in the Pontic–Caspian steppe across Eurasia (this steppe extends from northeastern Bulgaria and southeastern Romania, through Moldova, and southern and eastern Ukraine, through the Northern Caucasus of southern Russia, and into the Lower…

Evidence: 42 • authority: 88

Religion. Abstract Approaches to the study of Indo-European religion and mythology differ substantially from those of the other semantic categories. There are several reasons for this difference. First, and obvious, is the paucity of terms for the names of deities reconstructable to Proto-Indo-European; with the exception of a few reconstructions that are found in almost any textbook, a number listed in Table 23.1 are of uncertain or, frankly, doubtful validity. Second, given the very nature of the subject—the ideological content of an ancient culture (here substituting ‘culture’ for ‘reconstructed proto-language’)—it has attracted far more attention than many other semantic categories.

Evidence: 42 • authority: 72

The Indo-European migrations are hypothesized migrations of peoples who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and the derived Indo-European languages, which took place from around 4000 to 1000 BCE, explaining how these related languages came to be spoken across a large area of Eurasia, spanning from the Indian subcontinent and Iranian plateau to Atlantic Europe. While these early languages and their speakers are prehistoric (lacking documentary evidence), a synthesis of linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and genetics has established the existence of Proto-Indo-European and the spread of its daughter dialects through migrations of large populations of its speakers, as well as the recruitment o…

Evidence: 36 • authority: 72

Proto-Indo-Iranian, also called Proto-Indo-Iranic or Proto-Aryan, is the reconstructed proto-language of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. Its speakers, the hypothetical Proto-Indo-Iranians, are assumed to have lived in the late 3rd millennium BCE, and are often connected with the Sintashta culture of the Eurasian Steppe and the early Andronovo archaeological horizon. Proto-Indo-Iranian was a satem language, likely removed less than a millennium from its ancestor, the late Proto-Indo-European language, and in turn removed less than a millennium from its descendants: Vedic Sanskrit (of the Rigveda) and Old Avestan (of the Gathas). It is the ancestor of Indo-Aryan languages, the Irani…

Evidence: — • authority: 65