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-European: other ancient
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)?
Albanian words of unknown or uncertain origin
In previous posts, I mentioned 70 words inherited by Albanian directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and another 68 words borrowed by Albanian from other languages (mostly Indo-European). In this post, I look at another 32 Albanian words with no confirmed source in PIE or in borrowings. Together, these 3 posts cover the 170 Standard Albanian words…… Continue reading Albanian words of unknown or uncertain origin
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?
Some things I like about Hungarian
Hungarian differs from most European languages in several ways, partly because it is not a member of the Indo-European family of languages. Hungarian is a member of the Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. https://languagemiscellany.com/2024/01/the-uralic-languages/ This post covers some fascinating features of Hungarian: vowel harmony front and back vowels in deictic words possessive word…… Continue reading Some things I like about Hungarian
Hello, universe
After several months of producing unintelligible data, NASA’s spacecraft Voyager 1 has recently started sending usable information back to Earth again. Voaygers 1 and 2 departed from Earth in 1977 on tours of the outer planets, before heading off from the Solar System into inter-stellar space. Greetings, non-earthlings Among other things, the Voyagers carry a…… Continue reading Hello, universe
The Uralic Languages
According to Kiefer and Laakso (2014), there is a general consensus that there are 6 main branches of Uralic: Ugric: Hungarian (13 million speakers) and, in Western Siberia, the Ob-Ugric languages Khanty (almost 10,000 speakers) and Mansi (probably less than 10,000 speakers) Finnic: Finnish (5 million speakers); Estonian (1 million). Other Finnic languages have many…… Continue reading The Uralic Languages
From the Steppes or from Anatolia?
A recent paper takes a further look at some old questions: when did Indo-European languages separate from the rest of that language family, and in which order? where did speakers of Proto Indo-European—the ancestral language of the Indo-European language family—live? The paper Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of…… Continue reading From the Steppes or from Anatolia?