Have fun figuring out how to pronounce them though.
It is INCREDIBLE how many of these are basically still in use today.
I (1sg) *éǵh₂ == german “ich”
you (2sg) *túh, *te == french “tu” russian ты
we (1pl) *wéy == english
you (2pl) *yū, *yú
who *kʷis (pron.), *kʷod (adj.) == latin “quis, quod”
one *(H)óynos, *(H)óykos, *(H)óywos, *sḗm == spanish “uno”
two *dwóh₁; *dwó == french “deux”
three *tréyes == spanish “tres”
four *kʷetwóres == french “quatorze”… 🤔
Im no lingust, just uninformed observation.
We finns aren’t even a PIE language, and we still use some clearly from those.
The word for sea is basically exactly the same, depending on the pronunciation. We say “meri”, it’s marked down as “móri”. In Finnish yellow is “keltainen” and PIE says “ǵʰelh₃-”.
What do all those asterisk and numbers mean? I feel like I’m missing a key to decode that.
Edit: Damn, that little post lead to an actual TIL moment. I’m actually going to copy all your answers for future reference, since I enjoy etymology and get into contact with these symbols a lot. Thanks, everyone!
Asterisk means that the word has been reverse engineered without any direct evidence backing it up. All proto languages will have asterisks in front of all their words because proto languages are, by definition, languages that were used before anything was written down.
The reverse engineered word is likely to be correct (or at least, as correct as we can be), but in the absence of direct evidence, it’s still just guesswork
The numbers you’re talking about are because we know that there are different consonants used, but we don’t entirely know what sounds those consonants are. So we just write all of the consonants that likely sounded somewhat like the letter h as h1, h2, h3, etc., and repeat for the other uncertain consonants.
So basically h1 definitely sounds different than h2, but as for exactly what they sound like, all we know is that both of them are kinda like h
