Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Proto-Indo-European/reply (26)

There were several suffixes for each of those in use, just like in English. I don't know any specific ones, and it is hard to reconstruct their meaning because the meaning and usage of suffixes can often change. Even if you compare English and Dutch (two closely related languages) you'll notice that where English uses the suffix -ness, Dutch prefers -heid, even though both languages have the 'other' suffix as well: English -hood, Dutch -nis.

There are some things that I know about PIE word derivation, mainly because it is similar in later languages. Adjectives could be used alone, without any noun. This still happens in German too, like 'ich möge den großen nicht'. In PIE this was even easier because nouns and adjectives were inflected the same. Sometimes, such 'substantivised' adjectives could become nouns. There are some linguists who believe that PIE, in earlier times, did not even have a real difference between nouns and adjectives, but that they formed a single common word class.

To convert nouns or adjectives into adverbs, specific cases were often used instead of suffixes. This still happened in Latin. A well-known example is how the suffix -mente was formed in the Romance languages. In Latin, there was no instrumental case, but the ablative case was used with an instrumental meaning (so it was an ablative-instrumental case). The noun was feminine, and its ablative form was. The ablative could be combined with an adjective like, used in the feminine ablative form ; the result was rapidā mente meaning "with a quick mind" or "quick-mindedly". This kind of phrase became very widespread as the Romance languages evolved, and this particular example still exists: Italian, French.

There are also some examples in English of an 'instrumental' (if you can call it that) being used with a noun to create an adverb: with haste means more or less the same as. Other cases were also used to create adverbs. In the Germanic languages, the genitive case was particularly popular, and resulted in words like German, , and so on.

I don't really know anything about the Lycian script. You would have to ask in the Grease Pit.