this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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What are your thoughts on Proto Indo European? (piefed.world)
submitted 2 days ago by daggermoon@piefed.world to c/languagelearning@sopuli.xyz
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I've been reading about PIE and i'm confused. As I understand, it is assumed to be the language spoken by Europeans 6,000 years ago. No written record of the language has ever been found so the language has been reconstructed through seemingly arbitrary means. So, In all likeliness actual PIE sounded very different. What makes this language (as it exists today) useful? This is essentially a conlang that is too complicated to learn. What am I missing? Sorry if I'm coming off as negative. I find PIE both confusing and fascinating.

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[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Keep in mind the "Proto" part - meaning "earliest" or "parent" - that which came first.

Since there's no written form, not a single word, we have no way to know it first hand. There's no Rosetta stone of PIE.

What we do know is the commonality of words in so many different languages points to a common origin.

Sort of like the Big Bang - if you wind the clock backwards, to what do all these common words in all these different languages point?

Or like Dark Matter - matter we can't see but assume must be there because of the behaviour of planets and stars indicates another mass is influencing them.

Or like tracing human history through genetics - its a big funnel pointing to the origin.

I wouldn't read anything more into it than that.

Edit: The Great Courses has a course from John McWhorter (professor at Columbia) called Language Families of the World - there's a lecture specifically on PIE, and he routinely references connections to it throughout the course. (He also discusses other major families like Dravidian).

Edit2: Not just European languages - Asian languages such as all languages of Iran and most languages of India are Indo-European.

[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 1 points 15 hours ago

In this line of common origins, a more modern example that comes to mind are Chinese, Korean and Japanese. The 3 still preserve similarities, such as kanji and hanja, phonetics of words, and some structures. And having a better documented history of how migration and colonization went over there, it helps better explaining the similarities.