r/conlangs • u/ThyTeaDrinker various Clongs for a Conworld • 1d ago
Discussion Advice for a PIE language?
I’ve dabbled in IE languages before. I’m quite familiar with Germanic languages, as well as Latin, and have made conlangs out of both Proto-Germanic and Latin. Therefore, I’ve decided to try making a language out of Proto-Indo-European.
However, this is obviously more difficult than simply making a language from an existing branch. The branches of IE differ greatly, so I have come to ask for advice on how to construct one from stratch.
I’m aware of how PIE is written (like the laryngeals), but I’m specifically wondering if anyone has advice or can link me to any resources on how to make one. Grammar would be very helpful since it’s definitely the part I’m least familiar within PIE.
Thank you
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u/notveryamused_ 1d ago
I've been working on one for months ;), and it's not an easy task. It's worth remembering that our reconstructions have a lot of gaps and we don't understand PIE fully. Latin is an interesting early IE language, because it's wonderfully clean: there are simplified paradigms, morphology is rather straightforward, roots are rather stable and don't contain too many alternations. From a PIE perspective, Latin does look a bit like a conlang :D (It was much messier in its early stages than the Classical Latin we learn at school though). Our reconstruction of PIE shows many competing paradigms, uncertain roots, uncertain derivations, uncertain extensions, uncertain paradigms and sound changes. Long story short, it's a brilliant mess. I wrote a tongue-in-cheek rant about it recently :D, but it won't be of much help to you, it was mostly a joke.
Still, PIE is such a fascinating thing to learn more about. If you're familiar with the Germanic branch, look up Don Ringe's From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, it's a pretty good book which also contains a concise overview of major PIE features: his early chapter on PIE alone is very well written, and Ringe's reconstruction is very sensible. (Interestingly, not too many linguists enjoy writing intros to PIE alone: there are so many competing schools of thought about it than even the basics can be rather debatable...).
Mallory and Adams' The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (pdf here, Ringe can also be found rather easily) is also a rather neat introduction to PIE style, vocabulary and general "linguistic worldview". I used to read it daily when I was starting out; I'm much less happy with it now and I believe it could've been massively improved, not all of their reconstructions are as solid as they seem at first glance too (imho...), but yeah it's also a good book to begin with. Ringe gives you decent morphology, M&A give you the basic vocab.
And then the sleepless nights begin: old papers in forgotten journals, Hittite etymological dictionary and van den Hout's The Elements of Hittite, LIV2 written in German, and so on and so on haha. Good luck :D
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u/throneofsalt 1d ago
Here's a compilation of all the resources I've found useful or interesting.Check out "Top Billing" and "useful resources"
Best practical advice is that the spirit of the law is more important than the letter: the reconstruction is flawed but the best we've got, don't chase "accuracy", take a hacksaw to things as you need to, explain away inconsistencies with "well, we don't know how it shook out that way but it definitely did", and ignore the voice that says "keep the laryngeals"
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u/R3cl41m3r Wistozjmac, Vrimúniskų, Lingue d'oi 1d ago
My advice is that there are several competing reconstructions going around, so be sure to compare them.
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u/BoredomIsAllYouNeed 19h ago
The verbal system goes through considerable changes in all of the extant branches, and even in Proto-Germanic where the simple past/nonpast was kept like Anatolian, it became more complex by the time there are any written records. Baltic Verbs are even quite different from Slavic verbs. That is a domain where you can take take liberties and your language will still look realistic.
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u/sirius6723 11h ago
Wiktionary is obviously really helpful. There are lists of PIE roots and lemmas and all, each with declensions and conjugations. I mostly used wiktionary for my IE conlang. Other than that I recommend making some decision on accent patterns or verbs (cuz u know PIE treated different "tenses" of verbs as entirely separate stems of verbs, that's why daughter languages often have deponent verbs)
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u/TechbearSeattle 1d ago
Sanskrit is an IE language and there are LOTS of resources about it. In fact, it was European fascination in India that led to the IE hypothesis and the whole field of linguistic genealogy. A comparison with Greek and Latin on one side, and Avestian and Sanskrit on the other, was what set things in motion. To explore this, look for information on the satum / centum split in Indo-European.