What's New in this Edition

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A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, Second Edition
Preface · What's New · Conventions
The Indo-European language family
Traditional views · The Theory of the Three Stages · Urheimat · Other theories · Relationship to other languages · Schleicher's fable · Northern (Europe's IE) and Southern} (Greek, Armenian, Aryan) dialects · Anatolian languages · Modern Indo-European
Letters and Sounds
Classification of sounds · Sounds of the letters · Syllables · Quantity · Accent · Vowel change · Consonant change · Peculiarities of orthography · Kindred forms
Words and Their Forms
Inflection · Root, stem and base · Gender · General rules of gender ·Vowel grade · Word formation · Compound words · Names of persons
Nouns
a-Declension · o-Declension · Nouns in i, u and diphthong · Nouns in consonant · Heteroclites · Vocalism before the declension · Vocalism in the plural · Accent in declension
Adjectives
Inflection of adjectives · The motion · Adjective specialization ·Comparison of adjectives · Numerals
Pronouns
Personal · Reflexive · Possessive · Anaphoric · Demonstrative · Interrogative and indefinite · Relative · Other
Verbs
Forms of the verb · The conjugations · The four stems · Mood stems · The voice · Noun and adjective forms · Conjugated examples · The verbal accent
Particles
Adverbs · Derivation of adverbs · Prepositions · Conjunctions
Syntax
The sentence · Morphosyntax · Sentence modifiers · Verbal modifiers · Nominal modifiers · Modified forms of PIE simple sentences · Syntactic categories

This is A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, Second Edition, with Modern Indo-European Language Grammar in Version 4, still adjusting some important linguistic questions, and lots of minor mistakes, thanks to the contributions of experts and readers. NOTE. A version number (N) is given to full revisions of the grammar, and each minor correction published must be given a different number to be later identified, usually ranging from N.01 to N.99. This book includes a full correction of version 3, following Pre-Version 4, which means the correction was finished, and it its therefore 4.xx.

“Europe’s Indo-European” version 4 continues “Modern Indo-European” version 3 (first printed edition, since June 2007), and this in turn version 2, which began in March 2007, changing most features of the old “Europaio”/“Sindhueuropaiom” concept of version 1 (Europaio: A Brief Grammar of the European Language, 2005-2006).

1. Apart from the unified “Modern Indo-European”, based on Europe’s Indo-European (also residual or North-Western Indo-European, or Proto-European), this grammar makes reference to other coeval PIE early dialects, especially Proto-Greek, Proto-Indo-Iranian (or Proto-Aryan) and Common Anatolian.
2. One of the main changes of this version is the adoption of a writing system with a clear phonological distinction between i, u and their semivocalic allophones j, w. The artificial distinction of i/j and u/w in PIE roots and derivatives, hold in versions 1-3, was untenable in the long term, as it was a labile decision, open to future changes. With the traditional written differentiation we get a greater degree of stability.
3. Emphasis is on the old Latin-only alphabet, but attention is paid to Greek and Cyrillic writing systems. Stubs of possible Armenian, Arabo-Persian and Devanagari (Abugida) systems are also included. The objective is not to define them completely (as with the Latin alphabet), but merely to show other possible writing systems for Modern Indo-European, Modern Aryan, and Modern Hellenic languages.
4. The traditional distinction in writings of the controversial palatovelar phonemes has been extensively discussed and rejected. Whether satemization appeared already as a dialectal phonological trend in Late PIE, or were just similar individual dialectal innovations restricted to some phonetic environments (k- before some sounds, as with Latin c- before -e and -i), is not important. Reasons for not including the palatovelars in MIE writing system are 1) that, although possible, their existence is not sufficiently proven (see Appendix II.2); 2) that their writing because of tradition or even ‘etymology’ is not justified, as this would mean a projective writing (i.e., like writing Lat. casa, but Lat. ĉentum, because the k-sound before -e and -i evolves differently in Romance).
5. The historically alternating Oblique cases Dative, Locative, Instrumental and Ablative, are shown on a declension-by-declension (and even pronoun-by-pronoun) basis, as Late PIE shows in some declensions a simpler reconstructible paradigm (for some more archaic, for others an innovation) while others show almost the same Late PIE pattern of four differentiated oblique case-endings. The 8 cases traditionally reconstructed are used – and its differentiation recommended – in MIE.
6. The so-called Augment in é-, attested almost only in Greek, Indo-Iranian and Armenian, is sometimes left due to tradition of Indo-European studies, although recent research has shown that it was neither obligatory, nor general in the earliest PIE dialects. It is believed today that it was just a prefix that had a great success in the southern dialects, just like per- (<PIE per-) in Latin, or ga- (<PIE ko-) in Germanic.
7. The syntactical framework of Late PIE has been dealt with extensively by some authors, but, as the material hasn’t still been summed up and corrected within mainstream Indo-European linguistics – Indo-Europeanists usually prefer the phonological or morphological reconstruction –, we use literal paragraphs from possibly the most thorough work available on PIE syntax, Winfred P. Lehmann’s Proto-Indo-European Syntax (1974), adding comments and corrections made since its publication by other scholars
8. The whole section on Morphosyntax is taken from Michael Meier-Brügger’s Indo-European Linguistics (2003).
9. Appendices I and III were written by Fernando López-Menchero and published 2007-2009. The rest of this book has been written thanks to his countless corrections and additions in those years.

References

• Quiles, Carlos, López-Menchero, Fernando, A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, Second Edition, Indo-European Language Association, 2009, ISBN 9781448682065