Proto-Indo-Iranian or Proto-Indo-Iranic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Indo-Iranian/Indo-Iranic branch of Indo-European. Its speakers, the hypothetical Proto-Indo-Iranians, are assumed to have lived in the late 3rd millennium BC, and are often connected with the Sintashta culture and the early Andronovo archaeological horizon.
Contents
- Descriptive phonology
- Two palatal series
- Laryngeal
- Accent
- Historical phonology
- Subsequent sound changes
- References
Proto-Indo-Iranian was a Satem language, likely removed less than a millennium from the late Proto-Indo-European language, its ancestor, and in turn removed less than a millennium from the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda, its descendant. It is the ancestor of the Indo-Aryan languages, the Iranian languages, and the Nuristani languages.
Descriptive phonology
In addition to the vowels, *H, and *r̥ could function as the syllabic core.
Two palatal series
Proto-Indo-Iranian is hypothesized to contain two series of stops or affricates in the palatal to postalveolar region. The phonetic nature of this contrast is not clear, and hence they are usually referred to as the "primary"/"first" series (*ĉ *ĵ *ĵʰ, continuing Proto-Indo-European palatovelar *ḱ *ǵ *ǵʰ) and the "second(ary)" series (*č *ǰ *ǰʰ, continuing Proto-Indo-European plain and labialized velars *k⁽ʷ⁾ *g⁽ʷ⁾ *gʰ⁽ʷ⁾ in palatalizing contexts). The following table shows the most common reflexes of the two series (Proto-Iranian is the hypothetical ancestor to the Iranian languages, including Avestan and Old Persian):
Laryngeal
Proto-Indo-European is usually hypothesized to have had three to four laryngeal consonants, each of which could occur in either syllabic or non-syllabic position. In Proto-Indo-Iranian, the laryngeals merged as one phoneme /*H/. Beekes suggests that some instances of this /*H/ survived into Avestan as unwritten glottal stops.
Accent
Like Proto-Indo-European and Vedic Sanskrit (and also Avestan, though it was not written down), Proto-Indo-Iranian had a pitch accent, indicated by an acute accent over the accented vowel.
Historical phonology
The most distinctive phonological change separating Proto-Indo-Iranian from Proto-Indo-European is the collapse of the ablauting vowels *e, *o, *a into a single vowel, Proto-Indo-Iranian *a (but see Brugmann's law). Grassmann's law, Bartholomae's law, and the Ruki sound law were also complete in Proto-Indo-Iranian.
A fuller list of some of the hypothesized sound changes from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Indo-Iranian follows:
Subsequent sound changes
Among the sound changes from Proto-Indo-Iranian to Indo-Aryan is the loss of the voiced sibilant *z, among those to Iranian is the de-aspiration of the PIE voiced aspirates.