2. IE & IEs

PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN is the traditional name given to the ancestor language of the Indo-European family that is spread from Iceland to Chinese Turkestan and from Scandinavia to the Near East. A PROTO-LANGUAGE (Gk. prõtos ‘first’) refers to the earliest form of a language family presupposed by all of its descendants. There will forever be major gaps in the reconstruction of proto-languages, but as general linguistic knowledge becomes more sophisticated, so do the tools of reconstruction. The so-called Anatolian subfamily, consisting of Hittite, a language of the 2nd millennium BCE from central Turkey, and its immediate relatives from Turkey and the Near East, is by far the most archaic branch of Indo-European. Since Anatolian was the first subfamily to break off, the ancestor family is sometimes referred to as INDOHITTITE. Another archaic branch is Tocharian, from western China (Xinjiaáng). This is widely recognized as the second branch to split off from the rest. Much of the evidence for this evolutionary history is recent, and the terminology is not yet fixed. Instead of IndoHittite, many scholars still prefer Proto-Indo-European (PIE) as the name of the earliest reconstructable ancestor language of this family. Figure 1 is a recent cladistic model (from Ringe 2006: 5) of the Indo-European languages.1