The aim of the Indo-European Lexicon (IELEX) at The University of Texas at Austin is to collect the individual words of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the common parent of the Indo-European (IE) family of languages.
No documents of PIE exist because it predates the invention of writing. Historical linguists use the ‘comparative method’ to reconstruct elements of PIE vocabulary and grammar. Each IE word (often termed an etymon or root) is the etymological ancestor of a word or words (called reflexes) found in the extant documents of Indo-European languages.
The words in IELEX can be searched:
- by PIE etymon
- by reflex(es) in a descendant PIE language
- by 22 semantic fields into which the words are grouped. The semantic fields include physical world, spatial relations, time, mankind and animals.
IELEX is still under construction. It is available at Indo-European Lexicon: PIE Etyma and IE Reflexes
Early Indo-European Online
A related resource at The University of Texas at Austin is Early Indo-European Online. This resource contains online introductions designed to provide an ability read texts. It is available at Early Indo-European Online: Introduction to the Language Lessons
Each lesson series includes texts (usually ten) that are valuable for literary, historical and linguistic purposes. Each text is glossed word-by-word and comes with a brief introduction identifying its author and the source document, an English translation, and 5 grammar points. Other resources in each series include a glossary of words covering all lesson texts, a base form dictionary also spanning the texts, and an English meaning index to the glosses.
The languages covered are:
- Albanian
- Baltic
- Old English
- Old French
- Gothic
- Classical Greek and New Testament Greek
- Hittite
- Old Iranian
- Old Irish
- Latin
- Old Norse
- Old Russian
- Sanskrit
- Tocharian