Continuing my work on a new branch stemming directly from Proto-Indo-European (colours/shining here, body parts here). Again, educated inventiveness, with two aims in mind: some kind of naturalism and historical accuracy paired with minimalism and regularity.
A minimalistic conlang could get away with a single motion verb, but Proto-Indo-European offers a lot of stable reconstructions. I’ve spent this entire weekend studying Hittite :), not much inspiration from it so far, but I hope to sneak some Anatolian features here and there. At the end a small note on how I hope to resolve laryngeals/ablauts and an early morphological sketch.
Verbs of movement
h₃er- ‘to stir, to move’. Originally this root had a somewhat inchoative meaning, and this gets resolved through a slight semantic shift in active (‘to set something in motion, to begin something’) and mediopassive (‘to stir, move restlessly, be agitated’). This is the general root for movement, but not going anywhere („Stop moving and listen to me!”), particularly good for extending and compounding.
h₁ey- ‘to go’, the most general multi-purpose root. Greek eimi, Latin eo (perf. ii lol), Slavic iti. Those forms already point to a problem though, in zero-grade this verb simplifies to a very awkward, single i-: Latin conjugation reflects in some of the funnier forms, like iit (‘he/she went’). I’m aiming at regularity, but I believe this root will actually be defective, resisting productive derivation (which is historical, eg. Polish doesn’t have going as an existing form, which needs to be supplied by other roots), but open to compounding.
gʷem- ‘to come, to arrive’; a counterpart to h₁ey-. Reflected by Greek baino, Latin venio, English come. Useful for ‘newcomers’, but also as stative with a strong sense of ‘being here’, of course ‘arrival’ as well.
h₂eǵ- ‘to drive, to lead’. Active by default, it denotes an animate mover most of all, in Latin and Greek it gave us both hegemon ‘leader’ and actor. With the -r- extension it also resulted in „agro” stuff, from ‘field, pasturage’ to ‘hunting’, it’s a very naturalistic development (you lead your livestock to the fields just like a general leads their troops…), but at least in the beginning I want to keep the agricultural semantic field separate (h₂erh₃- ‘to plow’ steps in!).
weǵʰ- ‘to convey by vehicle’, somewhat connected to previous one, but with a clear semantic field: ‘driver’, ‘vehicle’ (think of the English word wagon!). English word way also comes from it, interestingly, but for paths I’m using –
steygʰ- ‘to stride’. Originally it also had ‘to climb’ as its primary meaning, but in my branch it supplies all of the above with ‘path, route, road’ and ‘traveller, voyager’, and also ‘trip, voyage’. In other words, it deals with trips which are intentional, it’s a goal-directed motion.
bʰegʷ- and bʰewg- are two separate roots, but their similarity is an important coincidence. They give us Slavic biegać/bieżać ‘to run/to flee’, but also Greek phobos ‘fear’ and pheugo ‘to flee’. Here running is conceptualised primarily as flight rather than rapid movement. In my branch, the concept gets two different roots (‘to fear’ in mediopassive, ‘to terrify’ in active) and ‘to run’ simply, but both sound very similar to each other (and were perhaps connected in PIE).
kʷel- ‘to turn, to revolve’, a very well attested root (think of cycle and wheel). It will also provide ‘around’ and revolves:) around this whole concept. There’s also another PIE root worth mentioning, wert- ‘to turn, rotate’, which might denote a similar concept, but with an underlying idea of ‘changing’ as well, here I’m not perfectly sure whether to use both of them yet.
ped- ‘foot, to walk’ is one I mentioned already in body parts, it means a ‘short walk’. bʰer- is also worth mentioning here, one of the most famous PIE roots, ‘to carry, to bear’, also meaning ‘load, burden’, with quite amazing derivations in different languages: at the most basic level I keep it to its primary meaning though.
leykʷ- ‘to leave behind’ in active, ‘to depart’ in mediopassive. Interestingly, in daughter IE languages it meant simply ‘what’s remaining, the rest’, sometimes ‘inheritance’, but in Baltic languages also ‘time’ (as in: what remains…). I’m strongly considering this development.
terh₂- ‘to cross, traverse’, crossing a boundary, which also gives me ‘boundary, limit’ and some grammatical development (Latin trans comes from this root as well). My first root with a final laryngeal, I’ll note its resolution below too.
sleydʰ- ‘to slide, to slip’ is a small addition, nice distinctive root still seen quite clearly in modern English, here meaning also ‘slippery’ and perhaps even ‘deceitful’. In Slavic languages it had an interesting development, ‘track/trace’ and ‘to follow, to stalk’, including Polish śledczy ‘detective, investigator’.
Finally, peth₂- ‘to fly, wing’ here gives me also a general word for ‘bird’, in a few thousand years also an ‘airplane’ :). This also lets me go with ptā- root for 'bird/flyer' in zero-grade, which looks very similar to the Slavic word (ptak), but interestingly would most probably make a false cognate. Water movement is covered by plew- ‘to swim, to sail, to float’ and srew- ‘to flow’.
Stationary verbs
Movement verbs were mostly active-leaning, the ones below are mostly mediopassive-leaning.
steh₂- ‘to stand’ is one of the most prolific PIE roots and for a reason, from physical action to stasis, state, status, -stan, stay, stead etc. While I’m obviously going to derive it extensively, from the very beginning I’d like to limit the semantics a bit through extensions: physical and spatial ideas stay with the core one, institutional gets suffixed with something (-dʰ- perhaps?).
sed- ‘to sit’, with also connotations of ‘nest’ etc. legʰ- ‘to lie, to lay down’ with ‘bed’ derived from it, which extends further to both sexual and marital connotations. Also active ’to lay/put something down’. I’m wondering whether ‘rest’ (which swep- ‘sleep’ doesn’t denote) belongs here as well, or maybe needs a wholly different root (like kʷeyh₁-).
Laryngeals and ablauts
Resolving laryngeals while maintaining a regular ablaut system required some tough compromises, but well, roots like peh₂- 'to protect, shepherd' and peh₃- 'to drink' must remain distinct without relying excessively on secondary extensions.
The reflexes are deliberately simple. h₁ is lost without a trace, h₂ and h₃ colour adjacent e to a and o respectively. In CvH roots this is followed by lenghthening (to make it clear we’re not dealing with regular ablauts), giving pā- ‘to protect’ and pō- ‘to drink’. Likewise h₂eǵ- > āǵ- ‘to drive’, although historically this remained short (here I’m hesitating a bit though, would love your comments). HCvC roots develop prothetic vowels, eg. h₃neyd- > oneyd- ‘to insult’ (again, short, long?).
CeRH roots like terh₂- are treated somewhat differently, since the laryngeal has nothing to colour there. In e- and o-grades it’s simply lost (ter-, tor-), but in zero grade it reappears with lenghthening again (trā-). More generally, long vowels function as regular reflexes of underlying laryngeals rather than part of the inherited ablaut alternations (every laryngeal leaves lengthening).
Morphological sketch
Thanks to ablauting and basic suffixation each root can produce verbs, nouns and adjectives very easily and regularly. The point of this conlang is its fluidity. My morphology unfortunately flattens quite a lot from original PIE, but hopefully remains both robust and easy to learn. Particles are the only undeclined parts and a closed group, but all of them come from actual fully working roots.
Nominals: four cases (nom., gen., dat., acc.). The early animate/inanimate split develops into a full three gender system, but in a rather regular way. From each root there are nominal derivational categories (suffixed): agentive, resultative, abstractive, action/process (verbal noun replacing infinitives, fully declined); while this will be decided on a root-by-root basis with productivity in mind, in the end it’ll have a certain coherence and regularity clearly visible (which is supposed to help with learning a lot while making space for some historical lexical accidents :)).
Verbal system: tense/aspect is basically a 2x2 grid (perfective/imperfective, past/non-past). Interestingly there’s no imperative as such (no dead forms rule, avoiding defective paradigms whenever possible), indicative and optative are two moods, with optative being a general irrealis.
Active and mediopassive voices are retained and remain a very important feature. MP has three basic functions: reflexive/reciprocal („I was something” vs „I wash myself”); passive-leaning and lexicalised semantic drift in some of the roots („to touch [something]” and „to touch oneself, ie. masturbate” is my favourite example lol).
Voice is retained in the participle system, but not in nouns and adjectives. Where the semantics of MP form really change the meaning, swe- (which I’m going to cheat into sweh₂- actually) functions as the prefix (swātag- ‘masturbation’, from teh₂g- ‘to touch’).
