Talk:Proto-Indo-European verbs

Yeesh, this article needs work. The focus is unbalanced and the prose is hard to follow, even if one is familiar with the material. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 23:58, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

compare the formation of verbal nouns in English, using -tion, -ence, -al, etc.

These are, in my opinion, bad examples of an English way to form nouns, as all three suffixes are derived from latin and probably mostly or only usable on words that are derived from latin or french as well.

I agree. I'm changing these to: -er, -hood, -ness, -ing.Ekwos (talk) 18:39, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I sympathize, but of those four, only -ing forms verbal nouns. -er forms agent nouns, and -hood and -ness form abstract nouns from adjectives. —Angr 18:53, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Maybe I've spent too much time in philosophy circles. I had weird coinages like "thrown-ness" in mind, but I guess that really is made from the past participle. Nobody coins new words with -tion, -ence, -al though, so they aren't really active. A reference to English should be to something that would be used in coinages. -er is so used as is -ing. The examples given are just foreign words that were borrowed that way so it doesn't make the point at all. Ekwos (talk) 20:02, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't see that productiveness is really required for the discussion at hand. I see you've added "-er", but I can't think of any verbal nouns in "-er", and it certainly isn't productive. (Agent nouns are not the same as verbal nouns.) —Angr 20:12, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I am going to delete an anonymous editor’s recent addition of a “Comparison of conjugations” section. I see that I am not the only one who thinks this addition lacks relevance to the article. The addition shows the conjugations of three related verbs in miscellaneous Indo-European languages. But I cannot guess what the anon think this shows about the Proto-Indo-European verb. If the anon wants to include this, he/she should explain what he/she thinks its relevance is.

(I notice that the anon’s IP address seems to change from day to day. It might be a good idea if he/she created a login so as to have a constant identity.) —teb728 t c 04:15, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

He's moved it to Indo-European languages now. —Angr 12:54, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

I find it a little frustrating that the only conjugation information this gives is the present tense. If PIE verbs had an aorist, a perfect, and an imperfect, shouldn't the article talk about them? ExOttoyuhr (talk) 16:21, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Why is there almost no mention of the perfect, only really the allusion that Greek stative perfects are strange?

The perfect conjugation is half the puzzle! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.177.236.113 (talk) 19:08, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

The section doesn't adequately describe the purpose/function of the endings. While it describes their phonetic behaviors, it doesn't say what those endings imply when appended to a given verb. How is the reader supposed to know? 72.68.194.121 (talk) 17:18, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

I linked from the table to the articles explaining the functions (Grammatical number, Grammatical person, Athematic stem, Thematic stem). --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 12:27, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

FTA: This can also be seen in the third conjugation of Latin, which includes most verbs directly inherited from PIE. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.139.81.0 (talk) 04:02, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm not totally sure what "this" refers to, but I think it means that the complex conjugational patterns that are characteristic of PIE and Ancient Greek verbs are also found in a particular class of Latin verbs, and this makes sense because that class of verbs includes most of what Latin inherited directly from PIE (as opposed to loanwords and new coinages). By implication, the other classes of Latin verbs have simpler conjugation patterns.—Greg Pandatshang (talk) 15:26, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

The article currently notes, at the start, that the Cowgill-Rix verb doesn't really apply to Hittite. However, nothing is said about what is different in Hittite, and how much of this system applies to Hittite the same. From what I gather at Hittite language, Hittite had no aspectual distinctions like the rest of early PIE had, so it seems that the concept of a "characterised stem" is irrelevant for Hittite, and so is the distinction between primary and secondary derivations. It didn't have a subjunctive or optative, while the active-mediopassive distinction was already in place, and is thus older. Present and preterite seem to be distinguished, and it appears that the preterite of Hittite continues the secondary endings of PIE, which suggests that the tense distinction was primary in Hittite and only became limited to imperfective verbs later. And what about the athematic-thematic distinction? CodeCat (talk) 22:27, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

The table of outcomes in daughter languages contains designations like 10a and 10b, but it isn't clear what they refer to; if it's conjugation classes, the articles about the grammars of the respective languages don't contain such numbering. Also, it seems surprising that only one out of more than 10 classes in Ancient Greek or in Sanskrit should derive from a certain form, and the question arises where all the others have come from. --95.42.25.28 (talk) 00:16, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

The table of middle endings inaccurately shows the second person plural ending as *-dʰh₂we for all sources (and -tdʰh₂we for the transitive variant in Beekes), with *h₂ following *dʰ in all sources. After consulting all the original sources, I have discovered that only Ringe reconstructs *-dʰh₂we with the extra *h₂, while all the others have only *-dʰwe or *-dʰwo (Sihler 1995), without *h₂. This needs to be corrected to reflect the literature more accurately. 166.48.201.55 (talk) 20:23, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Since I last checked this page a few years ago, someone has added extremely detailed reviews of the literature to the sections on the (h₁)se-desiderative and the perfective reduplicated thematic. These additions disrupt the flow and damage the readability of what is generally a quick, perspicuous overview of the stem types. While the other stem types are discussed in a few lines, these two receive incommensurate attention for no particular reason. It's not as if they are considered uniquely important and contentious; similar reviews could be made about each of these types, and the literature on each is enormous. I strongly suggest that these reviews should be moved to separate articles. ~2025-38000-28 (talk) 23:58, 26 December 2025 (UTC)

The article is currently over 10,000 words long and it's only going to get longer as I add more information about the different types of verbal formations in PIE. According to WP:Article size, we have reached a point where the article needs to be divided or trimmed. Perhaps some copyediting is in order, but it also seems as if there are some areas that could easily be deleted or removed to different. The section on post-PIE changes includes subsections regarding the development of the Germanic and Balto-Slavic verbal systems. It may be best to move this information to the pages for Proto-Germanic and Proto-Balto-Slavic respectively. However, all of the information in those sections is unsourced, so perhaps much of this content will simply need to be removed. It seems best to generally remove most of the section regarding post-PIE developments, as much of it is not used to explain the reconstruction of PIE, but instead to describe the grammar of daughter languages. For instance, there's a whole paragraph largely discussing the development of the Latin conjugations, which is probably best placed on the page for Proto-Italic. Perhaps the example conjugations and inflection templates could be split into a separate page just for Proto-Indo-European conjugation, akin to pages such as Latin conjugation. This theoretical new page could also provide more elaborate discussion regarding the reconstruction of the PIE inflectional endings. Graearms (talk) 18:58, 6 February 2026 (UTC)

I've split off sections for reduplicated presents and the aorist formations, reducing the size of the article considerably. It is now only around 8000 words long and therefore a split cannot be justified on size alone. I am still inclined to remove or split the information on post-PIE developments. Graearms (talk) 02:57, 15 February 2026 (UTC)

Perhaps you should consider just splitting off your own additions of "more information about the different types of verbal formations" - and restoring the sections in this article more or less as they were before them? I remember when the article used to be a quick convenient overview of one common 'textbook' picture of the situation, as it should be, IMO. Now, as I wrote in the talk section above, long and dense discussions and overviews of the literature on individual formations have been inserted, damaging the symmetry of the exposition, disrupting the flow and harming navigability. Besides the stuff on the (h₁)se-desiderative that I pointed out before, the sections on the sḱé-suffix and the éye-causative/iterative are now bloated monstrosities as well.--Anonymous44 (talk) 01:37, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

I have already split some of the added information into their own separate articles, such as Proto-Indo-European reduplicated presents, Proto-Indo-European aorist, and—just now—I created the page Proto-Indo-European desiderative. The difficulty, however, with the causative and inchoative suffixes is that they are not particularly large on their own and therefore they wouldn't exactly make for good individual articles. Moreover, I would vehemently disagree with the notion that the article should be a "quick convenient overview of one common 'textbook' picture of the situation." Wikipedia is supposed to retain a NPOV, meaning that we cannot just present what Ringe thought about PIE as if it is default fact without mentioning any alternative views. Many linguists disagree with Ringe's preferred reconstructions of PIE. For instance, most other scholars treat the "s-present" suffix as actually just representative of lexicalized desideratives rather than an entirely separate verbal formation. It is important that we present these perspectives and provide an overview of all the literature on PIE rather than just recycling one book on the topic. Also, I still maintain that the bottom sections about post-PIE developments don't really belong on this page. Graearms (talk) 18:30, 20 April 2026 (UTC)