Jay H. Jasanoff

Proto-Indo–European Morphology

Proto-Indo–European (PIE), like its earliest daughters (Hittite, Vedic Sanskrit, Avestan, Greek, Latin, etc.) was a highly inflected language. It is important to emphasize this fact in view of the many ways in which our view of PIE morphology has changed since the 1960s. For much of the 20th century, the burning questions in IE linguistics lay in the area of phonology, as scholars struggled to determine the number and character of the laryngeal consonants assignable to the protolanguage. It was only later, with the emergence of a consensus on laryngeals and the development of new methods of linguistic and philological analysis, that the 20th-century revolution in IE phonology began to spill over into morphology. Here the result was an even more radical rethinking of the traditional picture. The new look of PIE morphology differs profoundly from the classical account by Brugmann (b. 1897) and newer works in the Brugmannian tradition. But attempts to portray PIE as a ‘simpler’ (i.e., less morphophonemically complex) language than its daughters have proved misguided.