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A. Richard Diebold Center for Indo-European Language and Culture

Indo-European Morphology

Noun Inflection

Carol Justus and Jonathan Slocum

Noun structures are made up of minimal units of meaning: added to roots with lexical meaning, suffixes and endings add units of grammatical meaning. These morphemes (roots, suffixes, and endings) make up the morphology of older Indo-European words. Case, number, and gender or noun class endings are added to create nouns.

Endings are added directly to the roots of nouns called "root nouns", which belong to the oldest layer of Indo-European. Also old are neuter nouns formed by adding with the heteroclitic (alternating) suffix, -r/-n (-r for the nominative and accusative cases with no ending and -n before the endings of other the cases). Other old noun classes, named after the vowel suffix, were formed by adding stem vowels as the nominative (and neuter accusative) ending before other case endings. The youngest Proto-Indo-European noun class was the -o-stem noun class.

Nominal Roots   Inflectional Category   Grammatical Categories
Root Nouns       case, number & gender
-r/-n-Stem Nouns   neuter gender   inactive nouns
-o-Stem Nouns   masculine gender   (active) individuated nouns
-a-Stem Nouns   feminine gender   collective/abstract nouns

Derived nouns included infinitives, agent, and instrument nouns derived from verbal roots or stems.