Proto-Indo-European MOC

Proto-Indo-European phonology

While the precise phonetics of PIE is not and in all likelihood never will be known¹, a pretty good picture of the variety of phonemes, the relationships therebetween, and the phonotactics is deduced by the Comparative method.

An index of phonological rules is below under Rules.

Inventory

graph LR;
  hv[high vowels]
  nv[non-high vowels]
  phonemes[phonemes of PIE]
  phonemes-->consonants
  consonants-->obstruents
  consonants-->sonorants
  phonemes-->vowels
  vowels-->hv
  vowels-->nv
  obstruents-->labials
  obstruents-->coronals
  obstruents-->dorsals
  obstruents-->laryngeals
  sonorants-->syllabic
  sonorants-->non-syllabic
  syllabic-.->hv
  

As well as a variety of phonemes, PIE possessed Pitch accent

Obstruents

bilabial	coronal	palatal	velar	labiovelar	glottal?
p	t	ḱ	k	kʷ
b	d	ǵ	g	gʷ
bʰ	dʰ	ǵʰ	gʰ	gʷʰ
	s		h₂	h₃?	h₁

The obstruents are further grouped with

• Dorsals K contain the stops in the palatal, velar, and labiovelar columns.
• Laryngeals H contain the murky hₓ characters. See also PIE *e-laryngeal colouring and PIE laryngeal deletion.

Sonorants

The sonorant class are a distinct feature of PIE, comprising of apparently underlyingly non-syllabic phonemes with rule-determined syllabicity (See Siever’s law and Rules). This is in stark contrast to PIE’s vowels which were unalterably syllabic, and its obstruents which were unalterably syllabic.

However, w and y behave differently: in some situations² their syllabic allophones appear where the rules would dictate they shouldn’t, in which case they must be viewed as distinct phonemes u and w. In many cases it is impossible to tell whether the sonorant or the vowel is present, so conventionally the vowel symbols are used in all cases.

phoneme	non-syllabic allophone	syllabic allophone
*/y/	y	i
*/w/	w	u
*/r/	r	ṛ
*/l/	l	ḷ
*/m/	m	ṃ
*/n/	n	ṇ

Vowels

Note it is unclear whether vowels could occur word-initially in PIE, since all word initial h₁ disappeared in all daughter languages.

High vowels

See above.

short	long
i	ī
u	ū

Non-high vowels

The PIE system of non-high vowels follows a system of apophony called Ablaut.

• ē ~ e ~ ∅ ~ o ~ ō
• ā ~ a ~ ∅

where */e/ and */a/ were the underlying segment in the vast majority of cases.

e had allophones when adjacent to the second and third laryngeals: See PIE *e-laryngeal colouring.

Problems with neutralised contrasts

There existed a number of rules which make it impossible to contrast certain phonemes in specific environments.

• PIE *e-laryngeal colouring neutralised some non-high vowel distinctions when adjacent to laryngeals.
• PIE velar labialisation neutralised velar/labiovelar distinction when adjacent to vowels or sonorants that exhibited rounding
• ss was not distinguished from s. dʰegʰem

Accent

See PIE accent.

Rules

• Ablaut

Mostly productive

• PIE laryngeal deletion
  • H -> ø / o[+sonorant]_[-syllabic]
  • H -> ø / [+consonant]_y
  • H -> ø / CC_C
  • H -> ø / [+syllabic]_»^[Where » represents an utterance boundary.]
• PIE *e-laryngeal colouring (must be short)
  • e -> a / {_h₂ h₂_}
  • e -> o / {_h₃ h₃_}
• PIE vowel lengthening by contraction
  • ee -> ē &c.
• PIE syllabification of sonorants
  1. [+sonorant -syllabic] -> [+sonorant +syllabic] / _{[-syllabic] #}^[With exceptions]
  2. [+sonorant -syllabic] -> [+sonorant +syllabic] / {[+vowel +long] [-syllabic]}[-syllabic]_
  3. [+sonorant -syllabic] -> [+sonorant +syllabic] / {[+vowel +long] [+vowel][-syllabic]}#C_
• Other rules
  • t -> d / {V R}_#
  • ss -> s
  • s -> z / _[+stop +voice]
  • s -> zʱ / _[+stop +breath +voice]
  • [+velar] -> [+velar +rounding] / _{w u ū}, i.e. velar/labio-velar contrast is neutralised in this position. The convention is to write the (unmarked) velar here.³

Late-PIE/Core IE

The underlying segments remained the same but these synchronic changes affected surface forms, and became morphologized in some daughter languages.

• PIE *s insertion
  • [+dorsal][+dorsal] -> [+dorsal]s[+dorsal]
• Thorn cluster (metathesis)
  • [+consonant -geminate]₁s[+consonant -geminate]₂ -> [+consonant -geminate]₂[+consonant -geminate]₁s

Pre-PIE

These were mostly morphologized by the PIE.

• Szemeŕenyi’s law
  • [+vowel -long][+sonorant -syllabic]{s h₂} -> [+vowel +long][+sonorant -syllabic]ø / _#
  • [o -stress]n{s h₂} -> ōøø / _#
• Stang’s law
  • [+vowel -long]{m w h₂} -> [+vowel +long]ø / _m# (perhaps also h₁?)
  • [+vowel -long]yi -> [+vowel +long]yø / _#

Bibliography

• 2017. Don Ringe. From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, pp. 8–24 (§2.2)

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Footnotes

1. See Potential IPA key for PIE for a speculation of pronunciation. ↩

2. For i see newiós “new”, as contrasted to ályos “other” and sewyós “left”. u is posited to be distinct since it appears in some non-ablauting stems, such as bʰuH-. Brief discussion can be found in Ringe, p. 11 ↩

3. See Ringe p. 20 ↩