Proto-Indo-European Root

Proto-Indo-European Root

The roots of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) are basic parts of words that carry a lexical meaning, so-called morphemes. PIE roots usually have verbal meaning like "eat" or "run". Roots never occur alone in the language. Complete inflected words like verbs, nouns or adjectives are formed by adding further morphemes to a root. Typically, a root plus a suffix forms a stem, and adding an ending forms a word.

For example, *bʰéreti "he carries" can be split into the root *bʰer- "to carry", the suffix *-e- "present tense" and the ending *-ti "third person singular".

In its base form, a PIE root consists of a single vowel, preceded and followed by consonants. Except for a very few cases, the root is fully characterized by its consonants, while the vowel may alternate, a process called ablaut. Thus, the mentioned root *bʰer- can also appear as *bʰor-, with a long vowel as *bʰēr- or *bʰōr-, or even unsyllabic as *bʰr-, in different grammatical contexts.