Title of the article:

SEARCHING FOR THE LEXICAL CORE OF PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE

Author(s):

Mikhail S. Yastrebov-Pestritskiy

Dmitry M. Bystrov

Information about the author/authors

Mikhail S. Yastrebov-Pestritsky — PhD in Philology, Leading Specialist, Scientific Library of the State Archive
of the Russian Federation, Bolshaya Pirogovskaya St., 17, 119435 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6455-9546. E-mail: myp-63@mail.ru

Dmitry M. Bystrov — Founder of the information site “Orthowiki” (http://орфография.org/) and the Planned
Russian language project, Vysokovoltnaya St., 37, bild. 1, apart. 12, 390026 Ryazan, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9678-5804. E-mail: dmitry.alonecoder@gmail.com

Section

Philological sciences

Year

2020

Volume

Vol. 57

Pages

pp. 183-200

Received

March 31, 2020

Date of publication

September 28, 2020

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37816/2073-9567-2020-57-183-200

Index UDK

81’02

Index BBK

81.1

Abstract

The existing reconstruction of PIE does not distinguish nuclear and peripheral languages and vocabulary. However,
there are signs that a number of branches are peripheral, in particular, the well-studied Germanic branch. The paper
makes an attempt to find the lexical core of PIE, basing on structurally similar languages: Balto-Slavic (the authors
are also developing a reconstruction of its vocabulary — in particular, the Swadesh list), Greek, Italo-Celtic and
Indo-Iranian. The technique of searching for roots common in all four branches is described. The study has identified,
for instance, such roots with *g, *g’, *gh, *g’h, *gw (42 examples for the latter), as well as *(s)gh- (22 examples)
and *sk’- (10 examples) — sources of the initial *x- in Slavic. Several hundred of such 4-way matching roots are
already found, more than 1000 are expected. The authors also reveal lexicographic and organizational problems
encountered in the course of reconstruction.

Keywords

etymology, proto-Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, proto-Balto-Slavic, reconstruction, method,
*gw, *sgh, *sk’.

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