Let's Talk About PIE (Proto-Indo-European) - Reconstructing Old Languages

Ever wondered what techniques use to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European language?

Reconstructing dead and ancient languages is not an easy task when there are no scriptures or recordings available in the present day. In today's video, I show how some comparative methods across different Indo-European languages reveal the relationships between them, and how they can be used to deduced what the cognate in the Proto-Language PIE (Proto-Indo-European) may have looked like. Thank you to everyone who helped me illustrate Grimm's law and other sound shifts amongst Indo-European languages, and to Dr. Andrew Byrd himself who translated and voiced a sentence in PIE just for this video!

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[DrawCuriosity]

Just thought you might want to know, this video went up at Pi O'clock (3:14 GMT). HAPPY PIE DAY and as usual, sorry (but not really) for all the puns!
CORRECTIONS:
4:00 - that's not Greek for mother, but for father
2:45 - forgot to finish the list with Finnish

[AzrgExplorers]

Watch it, "you" doesn't belong on the *tuh tree; it was originally only used in the plural, from the separate PIE route *yus. The correct English cognate here would be "thou".

[frislander]

A lot of the conservatism of Lithuanian is actually in the morphology, particularly nominal morphology, since it retains pretty much all the case contrasts which have been lost in the rest of the family. In other places, such as the verbal morphology as well as some other parts of the phonology, there are other languages you could call more conservative, for example Modern Greek I'd argue preserves more of the original PIE verbal morphology, notably the three-way aspectual contrast and the mediopassive which were both lost/replaced in pretty much all the other languages.

[godwannabe]

Well, I'm hungarian. We're surrounded with these Pies. I guess ill eat it.

[Agras]

In 3:56, while you had given the rendering of each IE language for mother, in comparison instead of "μήτηρ/meter" (mother), you gave "πάτηρ/pater" (father) for Greek.

[notdaveschannel]

Mad connection of the day. The notion of P.I.E came about partly as a result of the work of philologist William Jones. He wasn't the first person to note that Sanskrit is similar to Latin but he was the guy who widely publicised it. The Greek letter π wasn't actually used by the Ancient Greeks for the mathematical constant. That came much later and was the invention


William Jones' father. (Also called William Jones).

[papaquonis]

Great video. Linguistics is such a fascinating subject.

[KhAnubis]

I‘ve found it interesting how closely linguistic evolution parallels biological evolution. So glad you covered this!

[gyohza]

Hmmm. As a lifelong speaker of Portuguese I must say: it's rather easy to understand Spanish, it is somewhat possible to understand Italian and it's borderline impossible to understand French.

[Kenzie]

I thought this would be a quick 10 minute video, but I had to keep pausing it to read all the slides. Good video. I look forward to seeing you again on π approx. day if not earlier.

[karmakanic]

Superb video. In 10 mins you managed to fit more concepts and examples than I've seen in hour long rambling lectures on the subject.

[kshatriyarajput]

Indo_Aryan And Irani_Aryan are Closer to each other than Euro_Aryan Languages,
But Complete Abesence of Euralic Substrates and Names in Indo and Irani Languages Indicates The Origin of PIE is somewhere in B/w North India and East Iran.
and also that Irani and Indo Aryan Languages are most Close to PIE than Proto_Germanic languages.

[pllpsy]

2:28 Although "a trăi" is the more widespread word for "to live" in Romanian there is also "a viețui" which is also pretty standard and does indeed follows the same roots. The same is true for most slavic derivations in the language. There is almost always a Latin derived synonym.

[mheermance]

The Doctor owes you a Tardis ride so you can hear PIE for yourself.

[markgarrett]

This is by far the best PIE video I've found on YouTube. Subbed!

[Petethehun]

“The History of the English Language” podcast series would be interesting to those who found this video interesting.

[XXRolando]

6:40 That was Ecclesiastical Latin pronunciation tho :/

[Werrf]

My absolute favourite tidbit is that we know that the people who spoke PIE traded for gold and silver, but did not smelt the metals themselves. Given that we have _no_ archaeological evidence that we can reliably associate with them, how can we know this? Well, it's because PIE had words for _gold_ and for _silver, _ but they had no word for _lead_ - which is a byproduct of smelting and silver-bearing ore.

[Mohamed-omxv]

Watching this video was fascinating (great job!!) because I was able to see connections between the different languages I speak that I hadn’t seen before. Like you say, I can generally make out the meaning of French or Portuguese from speaking Spanish, and from Polish or Russian from speaking Serbocroatian, but your charts highlighted just how close they all are. Especially with the context of many different derivatives across different language families, you can actually hear the shifts in pronunciation and see where everything connects! Just brilliant!!

[giovanni-cxfb]

This is the first video of you I run into and I'm subscribing already. Thank you for your top-quality work.