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Nominals in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) include nouns, adjectives and pronouns. Their grammatical forms and meanings have been reconstructed by modern linguists based on similarities found across all Indo-European languages. This article discusses nouns and adjectives, while Proto-Indo-European pronouns are treated elsewhere. PIE had eight or nine cases, three numbers (singular, dual and plural), and probably originally two genders (animate and neuter), with the animate later splitting into the masculine and the feminine. The nominals fell into multiple different declensions. Most of them had word stems ending in a consonant (so-called athematic stems) and exhibited a complex pattern of accent shifts and/or vowel changes (ablaut) between the different cases. Two declensions ended in a vowel (〔The asterisk * indicates that this form is not directly attested, but has been reconstructed on the basis of other linguistic material.〕) and are called ''thematic''; these were more regular and became more common during the history of PIE and its older daughter languages. PIE very frequently derived nominals from verbs. Just as English ''giver'' and ''gift'' are ultimately related to the verb ''give'', 'giver' and 'gift' are derived from 'to give'; only this practice was much more common in PIE. For example, 'foot' was derived from 'to tread', and 'house' from 'to build'. ==Morphology== The basic structure of Proto-Indo-European nouns and adjectives was the same as that of PIE verbs. A lexical word (as would appear in a dictionary) was formed by adding a ''suffix'' (S) onto a ''root'' (R) to form a ''stem''. The word was then inflected by adding an ending (E) to the stem. The root indicates a basic concept, often a verb (e.g. 'give'), while the stem carries a more specific nominal meaning based on the combination of root and suffix (e.g. 'giver', 'gift'). Some roots seem to have no definable meaning, as in 'father'; and some stems cannot clearly be broken up into root and suffix altogether, as in 'bear'. The ending carries grammatical information, including case, number, and gender. Gender is an inherent property of a noun but is part of the inflection of an adjective, because it must agree with the gender of the noun it modifies. Thus, the general morphological form of such words is R+S+E: The process of forming a lexical stem from a root is known in general as derivational morphology, while the process of inflecting that stem is known as inflectional morphology. As in other languages, the possible suffixes that can be added to a given root, and the meaning that results, are not entirely predictable, while the process of inflection is largely predictable in both form and meaning. Originally, extensive ablaut (vowel variation, between and ''Ø'', i.e. no vowel) occurred in PIE, in both derivation and inflection and in the root, suffix, and ending. Variation in the position of the accent likewise occurred in both derivation and inflection, and is often considered part of the ablaut system (which is described in more detail below). For example, the nominative form 'lake' (composed of the root in the ablaut form , the suffix in the form and the ending in the form ) had the genitive (root form ,〔 and are actually the same sound; technically speaking, is the vocalic allophone of . The same applies to the pairs , etc. See Proto-Indo-European phonology: Vowels for further information on spelling and syllabification rules for PIE sonorants.〕 suffix and ending ). In this word, the nominative has the ablaut vowels while the genitive has the ablaut vowels — i.e. all three components have different ablaut vowels, and the stress position has also moved. A large number of different patterns of ablaut variation existed; speakers had to both learn the ablaut patterns and memorize which pattern went with which word. There was a certain regularity of which patterns occurred with which suffixes and formations, but with many exceptions. Already by late PIE times, this system was extensively simplified, and daughter languages show a steady trend towards more and more regularization and simplification. Far more simplification occurred in the late PIE nominal system than in the verbal system, where the original PIE ablaut variations were maintained essentially intact well into the recorded history of conservative daughter languages such as Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, as well as in the Germanic languages (in the form of strong verbs). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Proto-Indo-European nominals」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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