Reconstructing sound co-occurrence restrictions in the ancient Indo-European language

What is it about?

Most languages in Europe derive from the ancestor language Indo-European. We do not have written sources on this language, but we try to reconstruct the Indo-European language based on comparing the languages that originate from Indo-European. Strikingly, even after decades of making these comparisons, some combinations of sounds are never reconstructed within the same word root. For example, a root never contains two voiced stops, like "bed". Researchers assume that the absence of these combinations is not coincidental, but represents a phonological rule in the language. Such a rule is called a co-occurrence constraint. In this research, we investigated to what extent the root constraints are similar to co-occurrence constraints in present-day languages. For example, Japanese also prohibits two voiced stops within a morpheme. We applied a phonological analysis that explains co-occurrence constraints in present-day languages to the Indo-European root constraints. From this analysis, it turns out that the Indo-European root constraints behave in a similar way as co-occurrence constraints in contemporary languages. This suggests that the absence of some sound combinations within roots is indeed the consequence of a phonological rule in Indo-European.

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Photo by Mr. Great Heart on Unsplash

Photo by Mr. Great Heart on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This research emphasizes that the comparison of languages does not just entail the history of individual words, but really teaches us about ancient language systems. Our findings show that the reconstructed Indo-European language behaved the same as present-day languages. Importantly, this adds to the evidence that the Indo-European language really has existed and has been spoken by some of our ancestors.

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