PIE morphology MOC
Prior to the discovery of the Anatolian and Tocharian branches of Indo-European, the eldest attested daughter languages seemed to agree on a system of inflectional morphology. Anatolian and to a lesser extent Tocharian did not agree so well with this system, and a holistic system is yet to be reconstructed so Core IE is taken as a starting point for morphological reconstruction. What little reconstruction has been managed suggests the development of Proto-Core IE saw some increase in inflectional complexity with little loss.1
root + suffix + ending
\___stem____/ /
\________word______/Inflectional morphology
Some features listed here may have derivational origins, but definitely by Core IE had become inflectional in nature.
Concord classes
graph LR; nominals[nominals - declension] verbs[finite verbs - conjugation] nominals-->|gender*|nominals nominals-->|number|nominals verbs-->|case|nominals nominals-->|person|verbs nominals-->|number|verbs
Verb morphosyntactic categories
The verb system of PIE changed substantially between PIE and Proto-Core IE, which poses more problems for reconstructing the original verb system.
| Feature | PIE | Core IE |
|---|---|---|
| Aspect | Derivational system, stems are either inherently imperfective or perfective. | Inflectional system, stems for perfective (“aorist”), imperfective (“present”), and stative (“perfect”) |
| Mood | Indicative (past, present), Imperative | Indicative (past, present), Imperative, Subjunctive, Optative |
| Voice | Active, Mediopassive | Perfect probably had no mediopassive form |
PIE also possessed participles, which were adjectives but could be nominalised to construct a subordinate clause. These were formed from aspect stems with the addition of a suffix.
Expression of inflectional categories
- PIE declension (inflection of nominals)
- PIE conjugation (inflection of verbs)
Footnotes
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2017. From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, p. 25 (§2.3) ↩