Talk:Proto-Indo-European verbs

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Yeesh, this article needs work. The focus is unbalanced and the prose is hard to follow, even if one is familiar with the material. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 23:58, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

strange comparison

compare the formation of verbal nouns in English, using -tion, -ence, -al, etc.

These are, in my opinion, bad examples of an English way to form nouns, as all three suffixes are derived from latin and probably mostly or only usable on words that are derived from latin or french as well.

I agree. I'm changing these to: -er, -hood, -ness, -ing.Ekwos (talk) 18:39, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I sympathize, but of those four, only -ing forms verbal nouns. -er forms agent nouns, and -hood and -ness form abstract nouns from adjectives. —Angr 18:53, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Maybe I've spent too much time in philosophy circles. I had weird coinages like "thrown-ness" in mind, but I guess that really is made from the past participle. Nobody coins new words with -tion, -ence, -al though, so they aren't really active. A reference to English should be to something that would be used in coinages. -er is so used as is -ing. The examples given are just foreign words that were borrowed that way so it doesn't make the point at all. Ekwos (talk) 20:02, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't see that productiveness is really required for the discussion at hand. I see you've added "-er", but I can't think of any verbal nouns in "-er", and it certainly isn't productive. (Agent nouns are not the same as verbal nouns.) —Angr 20:12, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

"Comparison of conjugations" section

I am going to delete an anonymous editor’s recent addition of a “Comparison of conjugations” section. I see that I am not the only one who thinks this addition lacks relevance to the article. The addition shows the conjugations of three related verbs in miscellaneous Indo-European languages. But I cannot guess what the anon think this shows about the Proto-Indo-European verb. If the anon wants to include this, he/she should explain what he/she thinks its relevance is.

(I notice that the anon’s IP address seems to change from day to day. It might be a good idea if he/she created a login so as to have a constant identity.) —teb728 t c 04:15, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

He's moved it to Indo-European languages now. —Angr 12:54, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Can we get a more complete list of PIE conjugations here?

I find it a little frustrating that the only conjugation information this gives is the present tense. If PIE verbs had an aorist, a perfect, and an imperfect, shouldn't the article talk about them? ExOttoyuhr (talk) 16:21, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

The perfect?

Why is there almost no mention of the perfect, only really the allusion that Greek stative perfects are strange?

The perfect conjugation is half the puzzle! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.177.236.113 (talk) 19:08, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Proposed endings

The section doesn't adequately describe the purpose/function of the endings. While it describes their phonetic behaviors, it doesn't say what those endings imply when appended to a given verb. How is the reader supposed to know? 72.68.194.121 (talk) 17:18, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

I linked from the table to the articles explaining the functions (Grammatical number, Grammatical person, Athematic stem, Thematic stem). --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 12:27, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

What does this mean?

FTA: This can also be seen in the third conjugation of Latin, which includes most verbs directly inherited from PIE. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.139.81.0 (talk) 04:02, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm not totally sure what "this" refers to, but I think it means that the complex conjugational patterns that are characteristic of PIE and Ancient Greek verbs are also found in a particular class of Latin verbs, and this makes sense because that class of verbs includes most of what Latin inherited directly from PIE (as opposed to loanwords and new coinages). By implication, the other classes of Latin verbs have simpler conjugation patterns.—Greg Pandatshang (talk) 15:26, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

The situation in Hittite

The article currently notes, at the start, that the Cowgill-Rix verb doesn't really apply to Hittite. However, nothing is said about what is different in Hittite, and how much of this system applies to Hittite the same. From what I gather at Hittite language, Hittite had no aspectual distinctions like the rest of early PIE had, so it seems that the concept of a "characterised stem" is irrelevant for Hittite, and so is the distinction between primary and secondary derivations. It didn't have a subjunctive or optative, while the active-mediopassive distinction was already in place, and is thus older. Present and preterite seem to be distinguished, and it appears that the preterite of Hittite continues the secondary endings of PIE, which suggests that the tense distinction was primary in Hittite and only became limited to imperfective verbs later. And what about the athematic-thematic distinction? CodeCat (talk) 22:27, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Unexplained abbreviations

The table of outcomes in daughter languages contains designations like 10a and 10b, but it isn't clear what they refer to; if it's conjugation classes, the articles about the grammars of the respective languages don't contain such numbering. Also, it seems surprising that only one out of more than 10 classes in Ancient Greek or in Sanskrit should derive from a certain form, and the question arises where all the others have come from. --95.42.25.28 (talk) 00:16, 27 January 2021 (UTC)