this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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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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[–] daggermoon@piefed.world 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Sorry for the late response. I read your post and some Wikipedia articles and also watched some YouTube videos and I now have a basic understanding of the comparative method. My question seems misinformed looking back. Side note, this topic also got my to read about Proto-Human language which Wikipedia says is widely rejected so that was an interesting detour. It's fun to learn. I'll check out the linguistics community. Thank you!

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 11 hours ago

No problem!

I should have gone deeper on the comparative method, but I didn't want the wall of text to become even bigger. But it's basically a task of finding patterns and working with them.

Proto-Human / Proto-World is an interesting case. Serious linguists reject it not because they know it's false, but because there's no way to know it at all. The method breaks once you go so far in time, even Proto-Afro-Asiatic (12~18kyo) is barely held together.

Glad you liked it!