Proto-Indo-European Roots
Root/Stem: | *wé-, wei- |
Meanings: | we, us |
Related to: | Greek - not found, replaced by 'hmeis; Homer also uses several forms with n- cognate to Celto-Italic |
Italic - not found, replaced by nos, nob- | |
Common Celtic - not found, replaced by *s-nés, cognate to Italic | |
Tocharic wes - we; wu (masc.), we (fem.) - we two | |
Avestan vá - we two, vaém - we | |
Sanskrit vayam - we | |
Albanian - not found, replaced by ne, cognate to Italo-Celtic | |
Hittite wes' - we | |
Common Germanic *wetu, *witu - we two, *wé
- we; > Gothic wit, Old English wit - we two Old English wé - we, Old Norse ver |
|
Common Baltic *vedu - we two, Lithuanian vedu (fem) - we two | |
Common Slavic *vé - we two, Czech ve | |
Notes: | It seems that there were two different stems in
Proto-Indo-European for this personal pronoun "we". They were *mes
(preserved in Slavic, Baltic, Armenian, partly in Celtic), and this *wei-.
Their difference is not clear yet, but some linguists suggest that *wei-
denoted "we, me and you", while *mes meant "we, me and
him". According to such a distinction, the first was called inclusive, the second exclusive personal pronoun. First all Indo-European dialects kept and used both stems, but then the category inclusiveness disappears, and languages had to choose between two variants for "we". Slavic and Baltic acquired both - the first for dual, the second for plural. The third stem, maybe just dialectal, which did not exist in the Proto-language, is *ne-, no-, seen in Italic, Celtic, Albanian and in several Germanic languages. |