Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Proto-Indo-European/reply (5)

I get the feeling you don't really understand all that much about Indo-European grammar and how the cases work. Prepositions really weren't very common in Indo-European because of the case system; the usage was probably similar to that of Finnish. A case was used whenever possible, and prepositions and adverbs were used only to specify the meaning further.

Another thing about PIE that is very important to understand is roots and ablaut. Without knowing how that works you can't really go into the depth of the grammar. To give a very short introduction, every root has a consonantal base consisting of one syllable where a single ablaut vowel e is inserted. That e can be replaced with o, or lengthened to ē and ō, or removed entirely. So, in a root like, the root itself is really *bʰ_r-, where the _ stands for the ablaut vowel. That means the root can take the forms *bʰer- (e-grade or 'full grade'), bʰor-, bʰr̥-, and also the lengthened grades bʰēr- and bʰōr-, although those are rare (if they occur at all). Suffixes also have ablaut vowels, and the same rules apply. Which grade a syllable has depends on the grammar: some cases have one ablaut pattern and other cases have others, and similarly for verbs. Changes in ablaut vowels are often accompanied by a change in accent as well. Roots are normally cited in the full grade (e-grade), so a root's entry on Wiktionary will always contain e. There are a few roots that apparently did not have any ablaut, but those are very rare. So a root with no e is suspicious.

Roots themselves always begin and end with a consonant. There are some words that begin with a vowel but they are not 'real' roots, usually they form adverbs and particles rather than nouns, adjectives and verbs. So the same applies here: a root beginning or ending with a vowel is suspicious and probably wrong.

One thing I haven't mentioned yet is the vowel a. That is a rather strange vowel in PIE. Several linguists believe it didn't even exist in PIE, while others believe it was very limited. In any case, it is a very rare vowel in PIE, so any word that contains it is again very suspicious and probably needs some close examination.

I looked at the entry 'au' you created. It uses indo-european.info as a reference. Please don't use that site as it is not a reliable source for PIE. The people of that site are creating a conlang out of reconstructions for PIE, but what they have created is not PIE at all. On Wiktionary we follow the scientific reconstruction of PIE only. In particular, their conlang does not have laryngeals, which are a standard feature of reconstructed PIE. The root 'au' that you added probably should be h₂ew- (because a is suspicious, most cases for it really come from h₂e), but I can't be sure.

Now about your new sentences... Personally I would like to keep the sentences as similar as possible, so we don't need to write three completely different sentences (with more chance of errors).
 * 1) I am not familiar with the root *prep-, but judging from its meaning I don't see how it can mean 'learn'. But anyway, we should probably use a simpler word like 'know' or 'speak'.
 * 2) Instead of saying 'has knowledge' why not just say 'knows'?
 * 3) I believe the normal term for 'this' was *ki(s) or *kos, but it's uncertain and I don't know its inflection. But even then, the 'general' pronoun *só suffices in this case, there is no need for anything else. 'In a good way' seems unnecessarily complicated when 'well' works too.