jaj•a•person's notes

PIE morphology MOC

PIE conjugation

Verbs were conjugated for tense/mood, voice, aspect, as well as the person and number of the subject. In strict PIE these were almost exclusively reflected by single polyfunctional morphemes (endings) in a similar vain to PIE declension, which was inherited unchanged by the Anatolian branch.

root + ending
\____verb___/

By Nuclear IE the derivational affixes previously used for converting verbs from one aspect to another had become more inflectional. Similarly, the innovative subjunctive and optative moods were reflected by affixes, yielding the following structure.

root + aspect? + mood? + ending
\________stem________/        /
 \____________verb___________/

Some reconstruct the so-called augment prefix é- for Central IE, but Ringe argues this did not exist for any ancestor of Proto-Germanic.1

In general, PIE conjugation had two phases

  1. PIE verb stem formation encoding aspect and later mood
  2. PIE verb endings encoding everything else

Ringe notes that the thematic stem inflections would have been easier to learn, and certainly the majority of verbs became thematic in Proto-Germanic.[^foreshadowing]

Core IE paradigm architecture

  • Verbs with only one aspect stem — Always unaffixed.
  • Verbs with two or three aspect stems — One unaffixed aspect, the rest affixed.
  • Derived verbs — Only imperfective, always affixed.2
imperfectiveperfectivestative
h₁és-ti ‘is’——
wés-tor ‘is wearing’——
h₂áǵe-ti ‘is driving’——
—bʰúH-t ‘became’—
—h₁ludʰé-d ‘arrived’—
——wóyd-e ‘knows’
dʰé-dʰeh₁-ti ‘is putting’dʰéh₁-t ‘put’
stí-stah₂-ti ‘is getting up’stáh₂-t ‘stood up’ste-stoh₂-a ‘is standing’
tḷ-nah₂-ti ‘is lifting’télh₂-t ‘lifted’te-tólh₂-a ‘is holding up’
sí-sde-ti ‘is getting seated’séds-t3 ‘sat down’—
gʷṃ-ské-ti ‘is walking’gʷém-d ‘stepped’gʷe-gʷóm-e ‘has the feet in place’
ǵṇh₁-yé-tor ‘is being born’ǵṇh₁-tó ‘was born’ǵe-gónh₁-e ‘is … years old’
wér-ye-ti ‘is saying’wérh₁-t ‘said’—
déyḱ-ti ‘is pointing out’déyk-s-t ‘pointed out’—
wéǵʰe-ti ‘is transporting”wégʰ-s-t ‘transported’—
wérts-ti ‘is turning’—we-wórt-e ‘is turned toward’
—h₂néḱ-t ‘reached’h₂a-h₂nóḱ-e ‘extends to’

Conjugations

tidy | en | sembr

Footnotes

  1. 2017, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, p. 30 ↩

  2. 2017, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, p. 42 ↩

  3. Notice the PIE *s insertion. ↩

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