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What are your thoughts on Proto Indo European? (piefed.world)

submitted 5 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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[–] zaphod@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago

I don't like the theory that it must have spread from a single culture, it could've been multiple cultures influencing each other. Then you don't get a single definitive version of PIE, but different dialects. And if these cultures spread out and mixed with whatever other cultures that were present in Europe or India you get yet again some new language variants that slowly turned into the languages that we have records for, instead of developing into these languages due to isolation. That's just my pet theory.