Proto-Indo-European pronouns have been reconstructed by modern linguists, based on similarities found across all

Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, D ...

. This article lists and discusses the hypothesised forms.

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo ...

(PIE)

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not ...

s, especially

demonstrative pronoun Demonstratives ( abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular fram ...

s, are difficult to reconstruct because of their variety in later languages.

Grammatical categories

PIE pronouns inflected for

case Case or CASE may refer to: Containers * Case (goods), a package of related merchandise * Cartridge case or casing, a firearm cartridge component * Bookcase, a piece of furniture used to store books * Briefcase or attaché case, a narrow box to ca ...

and

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual number ...

, and partly for

gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most culture ...

. For more information on these categories, see the article on Proto-Indo-European nominals.

Personal pronouns

PIE had

personal pronoun Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...

s in the first and second

person A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...

, but not the third person, where demonstratives were used instead. They were inflected for case and number (singular, dual, and

plural The plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the ...

), but not for gender. The personal pronouns had their own unique forms and endings, and some had two distinct stems; this is most obvious in the first person singular, where the two stems are still preserved, as for instance in English ''I'' and ''me''. There were also two varieties for the accusative, genitive and dative cases, a stressed and an

enclitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...

form. Many of the special pronominal endings were later borrowed as nominal endings. The following tables give the paradigms as reconstructed by Beekes and by Sihler. Other reconstructions typically differ only slightly from Beekes and Sihler (see for example Fortson 2004).

Demonstrative pronouns

As for demonstratives, Beekes tentatively reconstructs a system with only two pronouns: "this, that" and "the (just named)" ( anaphoric, reconstructed as by Fortson). He gives the following paradigms: Beekes also postulates three adverbial particles, from which demonstratives were constructed in various later languages: * "here" (reconstructed as a demonstrative "this" by Fortson * "there" and * "away, again",

Reflexive pronoun

A third-person

reflexive pronoun A reflexive pronoun is a pronoun that refers to another noun or pronoun (its antecedent) within the same sentence. In the English language specifically, a reflexive pronoun will end in ''-self'' or ''-selves'', and refer to a previously n ...

, parallel to the first and second person singular personal pronouns, also existed, though it lacked a nominative form:

Relative pronoun

PIE had a

relative pronoun A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause. It serves the purpose of conjoining modifying information about an antecedent referent. An example is the word ''which'' in the sentence "This is the house which Jack built." Here the r ...

with the stem .

Interrogative/indefinite pronoun

There was also a pronoun with the stem (adjectival ) used both as an

interrogative An interrogative clause is a clause whose form is typically associated with question-like meanings. For instance, the English sentence "Is Hannah sick?" has interrogative syntax which distinguishes it from its declarative counterpart "Hannah is ...

and an

indefinite pronoun An indefinite pronoun is a pronoun which does not have a specific familiar referent. Indefinite pronouns are in contrast to definite pronouns. Indefinite pronouns can represent either count nouns or noncount nouns. They often have related form ...

Pronominal adjectives

Proto-Indo-European possessed few adjectives that had a distinct set of endings, identical to those of the demonstrative pronoun above but differing from those of regular adjectives. They included at least "other, another" (or ?).

Reflexes

Reflexes In biology, a reflex, or reflex action, is an involuntary, unplanned sequence or action and nearly instantaneous response to a stimulus. Reflexes are found with varying levels of complexity in organisms with a nervous system. A reflex occurs ...

, or descendants of the PIE reconstructed forms in its daughter languages, include the following. In the following languages, two reflexes separated by a slash mean: * English:

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th ...

/ Modern English * German:

Old High German Old High German (OHG; german: Althochdeutsch (Ahd.)) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 750 to 1050. There is no standardised or supra-regional form of German at this period, and Old Hig ...

New High German New High German (NHG; german: Neuhochdeutsch (Nhd.)) is the term used for the most recent period in the history of the German language, starting in the 17th century. It is a loan translation of the German (). The most important characteristic o ...

* Irish:

Old Irish Old Irish, also called Old Gaelic ( sga, Goídelc, Ogham script: ᚌᚑᚔᚇᚓᚂᚉ; ga, Sean-Ghaeilge; gd, Seann-Ghàidhlig; gv, Shenn Yernish or ), is the oldest form of the Goidelic/Gaelic language for which there are extensive writte ...

/ Modern Irish * Persian:

Old Persian Old Persian is one of the two directly attested Old Iranian languages (the other being Avestan) and is the ancestor of Middle Persian (the language of Sasanian Empire). Like other Old Iranian languages, it was known to its native speakers as ( ...

Modern Persian New Persian ( fa, فارسی نو), also known as Modern Persian () and Dari (), is the current stage of the Persian language spoken since the 8th to 9th centuries until now in Greater Iran and surroundings. It is conventionally divided into thre ...

* Tocharian:

Tocharian A The Tocharian (sometimes ''Tokharian'') languages ( or ), also known as ''Arśi-Kuči'', Agnean-Kuchean or Kuchean-Agnean, are an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family spoken by inhabitants of the Tarim Basin, the Tocharians. The l ...

/ Tocharian B

Notes

References

* * * * *

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Proto-Indo-European Pronoun

Pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not ...

Pronouns by language