Wordfinder

Indo-european definition

ĭndō-yo͝orə-pēən
Proto-Indo-European: the hypothetical parent language of the Indo-European language family.
pronoun
1
0
A member of any of the peoples speaking an Indo-European language.
noun
0
0
A family of languages consisting of most of the languages of Europe as well as those of Iran, the Indian subcontinent, and other parts of Asia.
noun
0
0
Proto-Indo-European.
noun
0
0
A member of a people that speaks an Indo-European language.
noun
0
0
Advertisement
A hypothetical speaker of Proto-Indo-European.
noun
0
0
A major language family which includes many of the native languages of Europe, Western Asia and India, with notable Indic, Iranian and European sub-branches.
pronoun
0
0
A member of the original ethnolinguistic group hypothesized to have spoken Proto-Indo-European and thus to have been the ancestor for most of India and Western Eurasia.
noun
0
0
Of or relating to the languages originally spoken in Europe and Western Asia.
adjective
0
0
Of or relating to the hypothetical parent language of the Indo-European language family. Also called Proto-Indo-European and abbreviated PIE.
adjective
0
0
Advertisement
Of or relating to the hypothetical group of peoples that spread Indo-European languages.
adjective
0
0
Designating or of a family of languages that includes most of those spoken in Europe and many of those spoken in SW Asia and India.
adjective
0
1
The Indo-European family of languages: its principal branches are Albanian, Anatolian, Armenian, Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Indic, Iranian (often grouped with Indic as the Indo-Iranian subfamily), Italic, Slavic, and Tocharian.
noun
0
1
The hypothetical language, reconstructed by modern linguists, from which these languages are thought to have descended: in this sense, Proto-Indo-European is now the preferred term.
noun
0
1

Other Word Forms

Noun

Singular:
indo-european
Plural:
indo-europeans

Origin of indo-european

  • Coined in 1813 by Sir Thomas Young, from Indo- +‎ European, relating to the geographical extremes in India and Europe (which was valid before the discovery of Tocharian languages in the early 20th century).

    From Wiktionary

Indo-european Sentence Examples

  • The groundwork, so far as it can be ascertained, and the grammar are Indo-European, but a large number of words have been borrowed from the Latin or Italian and Greek, and it is not always easy to decide whether the mutilated and curtailed forms now in use represent adopted words or belong to the original vocabulary.

  • It has no connexion with Indo-European, as has erroneously been supposed.

  • Taking the term Italy to comprise the whole peninsula with the northern region as far as the Alps, we must first distinguish the tribe or tribes which spoke Indo-European languages from those who did not.

  • One has hitherto supposed that he was related to the Mediterraneans, the race to which the Bronze Age Greeks and Italians belonged; but this supposed connexion may well break down in the matter of skull form, as the Hittite skull, like that of the modern Anatolian, probably inclined to be brachycephalic. whereas that of the Mediterranean inclined in the other direction, And now the Bohemian Assyriologist Prof. Hrozny has brought forward evidence s that the cuneiform script adopted by the Hittites from the Mesopotamians expressed an Indo-European tongue, nearly akin to Latin!

  • Still less foundation exists for the belief, once widely spread, that Bactria was the cradle of the Indo-European race; it was based on the supposition that the nations of Europe had immigrated from Asia, and that the Aryan languages (Indian and Iranian) stood nearest to the original language of the Indo-Europeans.

More sentences

Related articles

Also Mentioned In

Words near indo-european in the Dictionary