The Europeans

The europeans
After the identification of one of the pre-historic language called the modern Indo-European family and the foundation of science of comparative linguistics. The main outlines of the reconstructed language were already seen by the end of the 1870’s, but it was only in the 20th century. The last decades of the 20th century have happily witnessed a resurgence of Indo-Europeanstudies, catalyzed by advances in linguistic theory and by an increase in the available data. Today the grammar of Indo-European is more organized and more sharply focused in everything.
Before proceeding with a survey of the lexicon and culture of the Indo-Europeans, it may be helpful to give a concrete illustration of the method used to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary and a briefdescription of some of the main features of the Proto-Indo-European language.
A number of Indo-European languages show a similar word for the kinship term "daughter-in-law" Sanskrit, Old English, Old Church Slavonic, Russian, Latin , Greek and Armenian. All of these forms, calledcognates, provide evidence for the phonetic shape of the prehistoric Indo-European word for "daughter-in-law" that istheir common ancestor. We know from other examples that Slavic regularly corresponds to Sanskrit u and that in this position Germanic o (of Old English snoru) has been changed from an earlieru. It is thus justifiable to reconstruct an Indo-European word beginning *snu-.
Feminine nouns in Latin -us and Greek -os, since they are an abnormal type, cannot have been created afresh; they must have beeninherited. This suggests that the original Indo-European form was *snusos, of feminine gender. It is reasonable to suggest that the three languages Sanskrit, Germanic, and Slavic replaced the peculiar feminine ending *-os (because that ending was normally masculine) with the normal feminine ending *-, and thus that the oldest form of the word was *snusos (feminine). On this basis we may add thefinishing touch to our reconstruction: the full form of the word for "daughter-in-law" in Indo-European is *snusós.
It is noteworthy that no single language in the family preserves this word intact. In every language, in every tradition in the Indo-European family, the word has been somehow altered from its original shape. It is the comparative method that permits us to explain the different formsin this variety of languages by the reconstruction of a unitary common prototype, a common ancestor.
Proto-Indo-European Grammar: Sounds and Forms
A large part of the success of the comparative method with the Indo-European family is due to both the number and the precision of the agreements among the languages, not only in the regular sound correspondences of the roots but even morestrikingly in the particulars of morphology, the forms of language in their grammatical function. Consider the partial paradigms of the words for "dog" (kwon-) and "to kill" (gwhen-)
  | Hittite | Greek | Vedic
Sanskrit |
nominative | kuwas | kú | (u)v |
accusative | kuwanan | kúna | vnam |
genitive | knas | kunós | únas |
  |   |   |   |
  | Lithuanian | Old Irish | Proto-Indo-
European |nominative | uõ | cú | *k(u)w(n) |
accusative | ùni | coin | *kwón |
genitive | uñs | con | *kunés |
  |   |   |   |
  | Hittite | Vedic
Sanskrit | Proto-Indo-
European |
third singular
present
indicative | kuenzi | hánti | *gwhén-ti |
third plural
present
indicative | kunanzi | ghnánti | *gwhn-énti |

Speech Sounds and Their Alternations. The system of sounds inProto-Indo-European was rich in stop consonants.  There was an unvoiced series, p, t, · (like the ky sound at the beginning of cute), k (like the c of cup), kw (like the qu of quick), a voiced series, b, d, , g, gw, and a voiced aspirate or "murmured" series, bh, dh, h, gh, gwh, pronounced like the voiced series but followed by a puff of breath.
If Proto-Indo-European was rich in stop consonants, it was...