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…… Continue reading The Indo-European Lexicon project
Tag: Indo-Aryan
Where did Russian words come from (4)?
In earlier posts, I looked at 134 words that Russian inherited directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the presumed ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages: 27 adjectives, 3 adverbs and 5 numerals. https://languagemiscellany.com/2026/01/where-did-russian-words-come-from/ 43 verbs https://languagemiscellany.com/2026/02/where-did-russian-words-come-from-2/ 56 nouns https://languagemiscellany.com/2026/02/where-did-russian-words-come-from-3/ In this post, I cover 36 words not inherited by Russian directly from PIE but mostly inherited…… Continue reading Where did Russian words come from (4)?
Where did Russian words come from (3)?
In earlier posts, I looked at 78 words that Russian inherited directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the presumed ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages. Those words were: 27 adjectives, 3 adverbs and 5 numerals. https://languagemiscellany.com/2026/01/where-did-russian-words-come-from/ 43 verbs https://languagemiscellany.com/2026/02/where-did-russian-words-come-from-2/ In this post, I look at 56 nouns inherited by Russian directly from PIE. In future posts,…… Continue reading Where did Russian words come from (3)?
Where did Russian words come from (2)?
In an earlier post, I looked at 35 words that Russian inherited directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the presumed ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages. Those words were 27 adjectives, 3 adverbs and 5 numerals. https://languagemiscellany.com/2026/01/where-did-russian-words-come-from/ In this post, I look at 43 verbs inherited by Russian directly from PIE. In future posts, I will…… Continue reading Where did Russian words come from (2)?
Where did Russian words come from?
In this post, I look at 35 words that Russian inherited directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the presumed ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages. In future posts, I will look at another 99 words inherited by Russian directly from PIE and 36 words inherited from other sources, mainly Proto-Balto-Slavic or Proto-Slavic: 43 verbs inherited by…… Continue reading Where did Russian words come from?
Lateral consonants
Lateral consonants are consonants produced with the tongue blocking (or nearly blocking) the airflow in the centre of the mouth but allowing air to flow around the side(s) of the tongue. English has one lateral phoneme: /l/, written as <l> or <L>. Definition Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) define laterals as sounds ‘in which the tongue…… Continue reading Lateral consonants
Languages in Finland
A booklet called The languages of Finland 1917-2017 was written to celebrate Finland’s centenary as an independent state. The author, Fred Karlsson, Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Helsinki, and author of Finnish: a comprehensive grammar (2018). The booklet is available online at Languages of Finland_1917-2017.pdf (helsinki.fi), along with Finnish and Swedish…… Continue reading Languages in Finland
Albanian suppletive verbs
Sometimes, an inflected form of a verb was originally an inflected form of another verb. For example, went—the past tense form of the English verb go—was originally the past tense of the now obsolescent verb wend. This phenomenon is called suppletion and I have discussed it before at https://languagemiscellany.com/2024/11/borrowing-verb-forms-from-another-verb/ Albanian has a surprisingly large number of verbs with…… Continue reading Albanian suppletive verbs
Reflexives and reciprocals in English and German
There are several differences between English and German in how reflexive pronouns (such as themselves) work. This post discusses one such difference: referring to plural nouns, the German reflexive pronoun sich can also have a reciprocal meaning. In contrast, English has to express the reciprocal meaning using a different pronoun: each other (or its equivalent…… Continue reading Reflexives and reciprocals in English and German
Where did Albanian words come from?
In this post, I look at 70 words that Albanian inherited directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the presumed ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages. The information comes from the IE-COR database—a database of cognates for 109 modern and 52 older Indo-European languages. I’ve written before about IE-COR. Database of Indo-European cognates – Language Miscellany IE-COR…… Continue reading Where did Albanian words come from?