You just being you, sharing what you love, brings me such joy. Never stop being you, Simon.

At first the bit about english 'on' being cognate with swedish 'å' really threw me, because the only swedish word 'å' i knew was the one that means 'stream / small river', which is a reflex of the same proto-indo-european word as latin 'aqua' is. Obviously not the word you were talking about, but i just couldn't think of another word that was just 'å'. The preposition that _means_ 'on' is 'på', which I always just kinda figured was some different word entirely that we'd just adapted to mean the same. But another, slightly archaic way of saying 'på' is 'uppå'; it's not a common way of saying it (at least it's not in most swedish dialects, i feel like it's maybe more common in norwegian), and i always just interpreted it as 'upp + på', but actually, it's 'upp + å'. 'Uppå' then got eroded down to 'på' in casual speech. And now that i'm reading up on this, i see that _this_ 'å' survives in all sorts of expressions that i use regularly but haven't ever reflected on. 'På' does not seem very similar to 'on', but 'uppå' and 'upon'? i can't believe i didn't see it. My mind is blown, good sir. I've been going around saying what is essentially " 'pon" my entire life, and i didn't know it.

When reconstructing Proto-Germanic, Gothic is a good place to look for situations whereas there's equal evidence that the Proto-Germanic word was one thing or the other, such as with "in". In Gothic, the word is "in", and seeing as Gothic seems to be our closest written language to Proto-Germanic, that makes it seem even more likely to be "in" in Proto-Germanic.

Could you please make a video touching upon the relationship between Germanic and Slavonic languages? I feel like more people should know about how the two groups shaped each other throughout history.

Hey Simon, great video as always. Just thought I'd let you know that your Yiddish text at 1:20 is written backwards; it should be right-to-left whereas you've written in left-to-right. Cheers.

About a plural invented by a baby --- a 2 yr old baby who lived in my building would yell "abba-day!" when he saw a cat. He would say this no matter which cat he saw. His mother figured it was related to her saying affectionate words of some sort when she petted cats. One day two of my cats were in the hall, and the baby saw them, and yelled, "Abba-dabba-day!" , called his mother over and repeated, "Abba-dabba Day!" It was the first time he had seen two at the same time.

“In” exists in Scandinavian languages as well (written “ind” in Danish). “Ind” in Danish is used as: To the center or middle of something or towards somewhere central Into the woods / in through the window / into the city “Ind i skoven” / “in ad vinduet” / “ind til byen” But also to apply (søge ind), to cover/wrap (indpakke), get involved (indblande), hit something (støde ind i). Very often used with “i” as “ind i” meaning “into”

I've started learning Latin after discovering Luke Ranieri and even though I recognize most words through the lens of the romance language I speak, I'm blown away by how many words have obvious Germanic cognates. Whenever I read about Proto-Germanic I'm surprised by how similar it is to Latin

9:00 Short version: that is definitely a thing German does. Long version: If I recall my course on German phonetics correctly, German generally pronounces voiced consonants as unvoiced ones. I don't know the English term for this, but in German it's "Auslautverhärtung" ("hardening of an end sound"?). A "d" is pronounced more like a "t", a "b" like a "p", & a "g" like a "k" (unless preceded by an "i", in which case it's the German "ch"). My professor, who was a native speaker, did note that there was an exception occurs naturally (owing to "Faulheit der Sprachorgane", or "laziness of the speech organs"?) when the consonant which would otherwise become unvoiced is immediately followed by a voice consonant. For example: "genug" would normally be pronounced like "genuk", but would end up sounding like "genug" in "genug gegessen".

0:00 'My qualification is in archaeology, not linguistics, and I will still make mistakes here and there.' Who does not (make them)? It's an amazing job you're doing and it's all the prove I need. Keep it up!

I loved every minute of this! Brilliant work. Thanks for the shoutout!

Love your videos Simon! Utterly fascinating and a pleasure to watch and listen to.

Whooo! Seeing your video in my sub box always puts a smile on my face! :D Keep up the good work, Simon!

This is my absolute favorite stuff, dude. I love this kind of highly technical diachronic stuff - and it's a great conlanging resource, too!!

It's amazing to watch a live reconstruction with every step reasoned. Thanks a lot.

I think your talks are fascinating. I can't get enough of them.

Great channel. There is something very calming about your videos.

Great stuff, Simon, keep up the good work! Been following your stuff for around two years now, and I've enjoyed everything you've put out, especially anything related to regional dialects and the evolution of language over time :))

this is my favourite video i’ve seen on your channel so far !! thank you so much btw , love your content , you’ve very quickly become my favourite channel

These are my favourite kind of videos honestly. I could watch this for hours

Thank you Simon. Another amazing video.

I would love to see more on voiced and unvoiced and aspirated and unaspirated. Especially how such sounds change according to discovered rules that remain consistent.

Love the deeper explanations on reconstruction! You know your viewers love the technical stuff. 😊

I love your Videos! Please more. Please keep up that great work! Greetings from Germany! 🙂🙏🏻

Fantastic video! Thanks for sharing your wisdom

I was watching your previous video and a new video came out thanks :D

More of this is always appreciated. Love language reconstruction!

proto-germanic and your videos on it are some of my absolute faves. i hope this brings some semblance of how far reaching your passion is -- your videos have really helped me discover my own love and passion for archaeology and linguistics. saying that, i've decided to pursue my own degree in archaeology and are eagerly waiting with bated breath to hear back from the university i applied to! thank you for these videos and your passion, truly. i look forward to every upload!

Outstanding video. You know a video is good when the last several minutes are just a blank screen yet you are still paying close attention. On the "house" vowel change in English & German, it's interesting how that sound is going back to something closer to proto-germanic in English dialects in parts of Canada and regions of the US near those parts of Canada. Very noticeable in words like House & About. Canadian Raising I believe.

Thank you very much for this extremely interesting video and no, I don't think your explanations are too complicated at all.

This was an excellent scholarly video. I'd like to see you having a go at Irish dialects of English and picking apart the interplay between English and Gaelic. Also as an archaeologist I'd love to see you discussing more archaeological topics. Brilliant always, beir bua

More videos like this, please. I think most of your audience is up for long-format technical videos.

Notification just as I came into my lunch break, couldn't be happier ❤️

Jeg liker virkelig videoene dine. Bra gjort!

I'd be thrilled for a vid on other substrate languages as touched on by the one questions! Thanks for this piece for now!

The level of explanation is exactly right for me.

I don’t know why but I haven’t seen any videos from you in a while in my feed. Glad to see ya Simon!

12:50 The Gothic word for bread is attested but it's unrelated to English 'bread': hlaifs (related to English 'loaf' and Finnish 'leipä').

Thanks from Denmark!

Incredible video and way of presenting this information. Would love to see this sort of presentation applied diachronically to some verbs. Maybe just the copula "to be"?

The Yiddish text for "in" should flow from right to left not left to right.

I need more videos like this!

To prove that protogermanic had "in" like the westgermanic, rather than "i" like the northgermanic, one only needs to look at the same word in other ancient indogermanic tongues. Latin has "in". Ancient Greek "en". Old Lithuanian "in" (still pronounced thus in compiund words, and in several modern lithuanian dialects where the standard language now has a long i written with a nasal sign). As for the final d in Dutch "brood", the final d is now pronounced "t", but in other forms of this and like words such as "broden" (plural), "god" , "goden" (plural), "dood", "doden" (plural) the sound is still clearly "d" not "t". Thus only d can be considered as the original inherited sound.

Simon, as always, so fascinating information in this video. As an Anglo-Saxon archaeologist (though not a linguist, but nonetheless interested in the development of English), coming from Manchester, who has also travelled to various Germanic countries (from Iceland to Austria and Bavaria, and had a quick course in counting in 'Schwyzer-Dutsch' from some Swiss friends some years back, I find all the stuff your talking about really interesting. I had intended to go to University to study French and German when I left school 40-odd years ago, but messed up my French A-levels so ended up being a geographer instead (which led me onto Anglo-Saxon archaeology, so all was not lost). As a result of my interest in langauges, whilst still at school, I acquired a volume by R. Priebsch and W.E. Collinson, called 'The German Language'. My 3rd edition was published in 1952 by Faber and Faber - I'm sure you might have already seen it but if not, although it will probably be dated now, it certainly discusses the evolution of Modern German from its Indo-European roots, and gives details of all the sound changes that appear to have taken place both in German, and also in the various other IE languages and in more detail in its various other Germanic sister languages including the northern and western Germanic languages. I understand (from the book sleeve notes) that there was a series of these volumes (French, German, Spanish with Portuguese Catalan and Basque, Russian and Slavonic, Greek, Chinese, and finally Latin, although I only briefly saw the French volume, many years ago.

Even in some Dutch dialects there can be a au-like diphthong in the cognate of “house” (MD “huis” from palatal [y:], present in many varieties still), probably also directly from a [u:]-like sound. One could say all “proper” Dutch dialects have [y:] and diphthongs derived from it and Limburgish (more going towards Ripuarian) and Low Saxon dialects have [u] or derived diphthongs. The u>y shift is considered to be typically west Franconian, so more “Dutch proper”. It expanded into some Low Saxon dialects too. u>y in Frisian is considered to be independent (it is somewhat older and has different conditions, based on dentals following etc., and also occurs in very conservative dialects and even North Frisian (all varieties). A long enduring palatalisation tendency in Frisian?

Modern Frisian has developed (some) phonemic nasal vowels again

I'm a linguistics student and I have to say I love your videos, it's just so incredibly interesting, it's a pity we never really talked about origins in our lectures and seminars.

Thank-you for including Yiddish in your examples, Simon! Most people will use the "lax" vowel, but in some dialects or formal registers of speech, that segment can be realized as [i]. (The only issue I have is that your formatting messed up the word! All the letters are in the correct order, but Yiddish goes right to left: ״אין״) All the best! מיט ליבע פין קאנאדא

Hi Simon great video as always! Just something to look out for when typing or pasting right-to-left languages like Yiddish into video editing software, it usually comes out backwards unless you reverse it again yourself, so in this case it should be אין rather than ןיא. Silly really how most software nowadays still can’t recognise this automatically but there you go.

The final vowel of neuter nouns is actually attested in Proto-Norse runic inscriptions, for example in the golden horns of Gallehus. So the existence of vowel itself in Proto-Germanic is clear, only its nasality would need further explanation.

We should note that not all German dialects have final fortition. Many southern German dialects come to mind. Thanks for your video!

Ars oc friðar, Simon!

Splendid video as always. I must say you’re getting really darn good at this so cudos to you! Regarding the Proto-Germanic nasal vowels @14:53 all later Germanic languages lost the root suffix vowels including those that were nasalized as you mentioned. So those nasalized vowels were lost everywhere. The Proto-Germanic nasalized root vowels how ever (such as *-Vnht turning into nasalized *-Vht which carries down through all Germanic languages, including Old High German and Gothic) were not only still preserved in Old Norse in many dialects. They still are preserved in the Swedish dialect/language Elfdalian/Elfdalecarlian till this very day. Compare Proto-Germanic *ganhtiz which turned into later Proto-Germanic *gãhtiz [ɤɑ̃:xtiz] meaning ”door post”. In Old Norse this was (dura)gátt/gǫ́tt [gã:t:]/[gɔ̃:t:] while in Modern Elfdalian it is still (dörå)gǫt [gõ:t] with preserved Proto-Germanic era nasalization and the same meaning of "door post". Which is quite amazing. Archaic Standard Swedish as well as other Modern Swedish dialects "dörr(a)gåt" how ever no longer have a nasalized vowel here. In the 15-hundreds the Swedish king Gustav Vasa fled west from the Swedish capital "Stokkholm" to get away from the Danes that were attacking. He fled to the region which included the Elfdale to rally the Elfdalecarlians as well as others from the area. King Gustav spoke to them in contemporary Stockholm Swedish and they had no trouble comunicating with each other. Whether Stockholm Swedish had the nasal vowels intact at that time we can not know for sure. We strongly suspect it didn't. Stockholm Swedish went on to change a lot over the following centuries while Elfdalian either didn't or changed in other directions and now the rest of Sweden can't really understand what the Elfdalians are saying any more.

Your channel is fantastic Simon, your answering all the questions I have about language, whilst enlightening me with other questions that the answer might just be self explanatory. N.b I wonder If the Scandinavian phonic for the word 'on' is 'e' because of the weather factor...it's very cold there so a person might have vocalized the word 'On' not fully?...just my theory

About the understanding Proto-Germanic is more comprehensible for modern German speakers. Well kind of yes. You once did a video where you had some people from all over the world try to guess what some old-english/anglo-saxon sentence meant and i was yelling at the screen because to me the meaning was mostly clear (not perfectly but broadly speaking). so i was able to better understand that then a modern English speaker. Very important in this case was that i am from a weird region in the Rhineland (namely on the border between ripuarian (middle frankish) and lower frankish dialects where some really old speech patterns were preserved. like pronouncing most g as hard ch so gut (good) is chutt (khutt? i just don't know how to write that) inferring from that there might be a slight chance that i could be more then randomly right about guesses. for the sentence with the cat i correctly guessed bread, house (which is "huus" in my dialect), eat (in this case for its similarity to ate) and cat (because it sounds like latin catus). only house had something to do with my dialect tough. So in total i guess for speakers of modern german that know dialects that are somewhat geographically (and thus probably linguistically) closer to the origin of protogermanic might have some little advantage.

Had to look twice at the thumbnail to not see the face of a man who looks surprised and pleased with himself

thank god I found you again

Thanks again for another great video. I would love to hear more about Gothic and the other East Germanic languages. Jackson does have a great video on the subject but it'd be awesome to hear more from either of you

Brilliant

In Dutch, words ending in d in singular still get a d sound when made plural. 1 brood [bro:t] 2 broden [bro:den] This is the rule we learn as kids to determine whether to spell t or d: just make it plural and drop the ending again.

Hello Simon, please may I wish you a very happy Christmas wherever you end up spending it. I would like to see you researching Christmas greetings throughout time, and how they have changed. Nevertheless, wishing you Season's Greetings!

A lot of other people have commented on that, but I’d like to add something to the “I as a native German speaker” thing: Even though I don’t believe there is an apparent method by which you can measure better intelligibility, I believe your comment on why German native speakers have no advantage in understanding Proto-Germanic is not correct. Most native speakers of German speak, understand or are exposed not only to Standard German, but a dialect as well. However, only a minority of German dialects are actually Upper-German dialects and therefore have all of the features of the High-German consonant shift. So, for the majority of Germans it is intuitively transparent that “t” and “s” are alternative phonemes (for example “das” and in the Franconian dialects “dat”), “p” and “f” are alternative (“op” and “auf”), etc. The High-German consonant shift is therefore not necessarily something that makes intelligibility harder. I would say that for the majority of Germans words without the shift just sound a bit like a dialectal pronunciation, particularly more “Low German” or more “Dutch”.

The vowel in "in" was still nasal in Old Norse, though not explicitly written. The nasality survives to the modern day in Elfdalian and relatives.

Really pleased you’ve included Yiddish in 1:14. I believe it more closely retained the medieval pronunciation. Just a correction to the spelling. The Hebrew letters are reversed, but should be written right to left. So אין rather than ןיא. Also, for the word bread, in Yiddish it is pronounced /bʁɔɪt/ or broyt.

Great video as always. Did you say the t/d were more dental-alveolar, similar to Romance languages now, rather than more alveolar in modern Germanic? Is Germanic the only major branch of IE that uses non-dental t/d sound?

Would you consider doing a video on the adoption/:adaption of a pan-american accent in music in Britain and its effect on the vernacular? Plenty of nicely recorded source material, especially considering The Beatles' wide gap between Scouse to the aforementioned hodge-podge and skiffle's treatment of some pretty afro-heavy influenced songs with lower class Southern English thrown in (Thinking of Lonnie Donegan specifically). I had fun trying to wrangle Lonnie's intro to 'Have a Drink on Me' live '61 into IPA, very English shouts if you know what I mean, but that's somewhat beside the point.

It's interesting that at least American English speakers hear the Finnish k, p, t consonants (that are unaspirated) closer to b,d,g in their language. Many Finnish American names have thus changed to reflect that in writing, too: for example, the surname "Pekkala" is often found in the form "Bekkala" in the U.S and Canada. Similarly I read a transcript of an interview of Finnish Americans where the name "Durrala" was found - I realized that it certainly meant the Finnish last name "Törölä". I've also learnt that many Finnish people I know can't hear the difference between "a pack" and "a bag" etc.

I find your information very interesting. I would be interested in knowing how the languages diversified in Latin America and South America indigenous languages. I was raised with Spanish and English but have several friends whose mother tongue was Ketchi, Achi, (Guatemala)and Quechua in SA. Also there is so many languages in México. They use larengeal sounds and sometimes types of clicking. The written form of those closest to México follow the Spanish phonetics.

Christopher Marlow was the author of all the work attributed to a sheep farmer from Stratford Upon Avon

A note on the Anglish question: if we keep other things equal and either remove William the Bastard or tilt the result of Hastings the other way, it's quite likely that England would fall (back) into Norwegian or Danish influence, perhaps after a few decades of chaos and civil war on all sides. We often forget that one of the reasons Harold Godwinson was defeated at Hastings in part because his army had been exhausted and depleted by Harald Hardrade at Stamford Bridge a few weeks before. Norse influence on English was already entrenched by then, and would likely have only gotten more so, either by inertia or by active geopolitical measures. Thus there would have been no 'pure' Anglish, just a different evolution, with different influences.

I've seen enough of these videos to know what the sentence is right on seeing it, no matter the language. 😺

I kinda wish you had included Faroese, but it would've thrown you off in certain spots. For instance, in is indeed in Faroese like in Icelandic but it's pronounced [ʊi:(j)] and historically, it even had a sharpened (~Holtzmann's Law version 2.0) form íggj pronounced [ʊ(j)tʃ:]. Bread in Faroese is breyð [prɛi:(j)]. Old Norse would most likely have been pronounced as nasal in certain times so [i:] or [ĩ:] though you did bring this up.

Simon, please talk about the transition from general british to southern american dialect/accent! Please! I'll buy you a new paisley shirt!

I'd just be really interested hearing about how Simon got into studying linguistics in his own time, and what resources he uses. Something that interested me about the video was the Scots word "breid". I've grown up in Dumfries in the southwest of Scotland and I've never heard of a lot of Scots words, which I'm assuming is because of the proximity to the English border (maybe the Kingdom of Strathclyde and the Cumbric language as well). Though we do have our own unique word which isn't used further north, "ken" which is used instead of "know".

Either you find this exceptionally tedious or completely engrossing. There’s no in-between.

Gave you a really bad drunken hand shake in alley bar😅 Nice to see the man himself

Regarding understanding of the older languages, it depends. For one, you have to be very familiar with a descendant language. A lot of words survive as an obscure regionalisms, older meanings ("gay boner") or synonyms (English is the only Germanic language where the main word for dog is not some variation of "h(o)und" as far as I know). So if you are a well-read person, you might power through some "Beowulf" with relative ease. Second, it will get easier with any additional language you know. I remember having to read couple of Latin texts to help my friend with university. I don't know Latin, but I know several Romance languages to a various degree so I pieced together some pidgin that was enough and with a lot of pain we analized some old poems. And even then, a lot of words were not preserved at all and I kind of guessed them from some cognates in Germanic or Slavic languages. In general, I would say that other Germanic speakers understand more from older texts due to lack of strong French influences, but that difference is not significant

Wonderful

7:09 That's also a feature in at least American English when you start a word with /b/ after a pause. A /b/ in the middle of a word or smooth speech will sound like [b] "b" with the voice, but when it's the first sound you make, it's closer to (but maybe not *identical* to) a [p]. The voice onset time (the time between the building of pressure in mouth to say a stop sound and the start of your vocal fold vibration) is delayed until just before your lips separate. Of course, we don't distinguish this because our usual /p/ sound in the same environment includes a puff of air - aspiration, which is the difference between the /p/s in "peak", with aspiration, and "speak", without it. So yeah, anyway, /b/ can be thought of as having two versions (or allophones): unaspirated [p] "*B*aking cakes..." and normal [b] "...to be go*bb*led", and /p/ has two: aspirated "*P*ool *p*arties..." and unaspirated "in s*p*ring..." [p]. Altogether, this is called constitutes a form of fortis-lenis contrast (in which languages recognize/classify sounds by how much they interrupt voicing and/or how much force is when they're released). In fact, Icelandic does this officially, with "b" standing for unaspirated /p/ and "p" standing for aspirated /p/.

I did miss the random bits of garden video. The white screen was a bit boring!

I'm just viewing this now, but wanted to point out a possible connection. I learned from Polymathy's channel that the -um ending in Classical Latin pronunciation had the "m" fully nasalized. If this is mostly preserved from PIE -om, then it helps explain the shift to -ã in proto-Germanic. It actually sounds very similar to -om with nasalized "m" except you don't fully close your lips. The only thing left is to excuse the slight vowel shifts.

Really nice video. You know, you don't need to apologize for making theoretical or even a bit dryish topics. For some of us, it's just what we need to chill after a day of work. And completely unrelated comment : some reconstruction of proto-indo-european looks pretty much easier to understand for speakers of English (i mean of the kind that ants to make a little linguistic effort) than most other indo european languages. And we say, Norman conquest, Norman conquest, but who invaded the land of the good and sweet brittoromans? I'm just asking... Best to you

3:34 Yes, it is indeed rare for /n/ to be added to a word; it is much more common for it to disappear. But, in some English words, /n/ was added where it previously did not occur. For example, the word 'nickname' was 'ekename' in Middle English; it started to be pronounced with a /n/, because the phrase 'an ekename' was realized as 'a nekename'; this process is called rebracketing and it happened in many other words in English.

I find it interesting as well that the preposition 'in' in Latin is also 'in'. Eg 'Caesar in Galliam est'

I’d love to know more about eastern Germanic languages and their relation to northern and western Germanic

Regarding the coincidence at the end, it's interesting that _both_ of the long high vowels underwent this shift in both languages: /i:/ became /ai/ and /u:/ became /au/ in both English and High German. Furthermore, the front vowel went through an intermediate /əi/ stage in both languages (which is where German got the spelling ‘ei’ for this sound). The back vowel went through an analogous intermediate /əu/ stage in English, but I don't know about German. (By the way, the ‘ou’ spelling for the back vowel in English is based on French spelling from when the pronunciation was still /u:/.)

How familiar are you with Frisian? I've just started attempting to learn West Frisian. It intrigues me as it's supposedly the closest language to English. I'd be very interested in any thoughts you might have on the subject (or any videos you may have made about it at I haven't seen yet). Thanks

Great video, Simon! As to the question if a German speaker would understand Proto-Germanic. Well… I‘m a native German and English speaker and most of the time I would try to compare the word to modern German words but it‘s still very hard. I watched a video (by Jackson the Saxon) with a lot of example sentences in Proto-Germanic and it was hard to understand if trying to compare to German. For example the Proto-Germanic word for „booth“ (I can’t write it properly in PrG) would be in German „Bude“, it‘s similar but still very different. Only after I was told that it means a little shop I was able to recognise the German word. Another example was the PrG word for „toy shop“. The actual word that was used for „toy“ is nonexistent in modern English/modern German, but it is still existant in modern Icelandic. A third word was „hundas“ which is easy to understand, it‘s „Hund“ in modern German, „Hound, dog“ in modern English. So I‘d say it depends on the word, the more outfashioned the word is, the harder it is to understand for a German speaker. (I‘m no expert on any of this, I‘m just interested in the history of languages, mostly Germanic languages and enjoy seeing the connections between the languages)

To answer your question about whether the German genitive uses the suffix "s": It does, but only for in specific cases.

I believe a similar process happened in Latin and its descendants. Words that originally ended -OM in proto Latin , became -UM, them it became a nasalised U, then became -O or lost altogether in daughter languages of Latin. I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong.

Also Shakespeare tends to go for iambic pentameter (or was it hexameter), and I doubt people conversationally spoke like that!

You could make much, much longer videos, and I'd still watch them....

Simon, could you go over the German substrate Hypothesis? It's fascinating

There's enough evidence for German's devoicing in German alone, as the historically voiced stops still show up in spelling and inflected forms: Brot /bʁoːtʰ/, Brote /ˈbʁoː.tʰə/ Hand /hantʰ/, Hände /ˈhɛn.də/

Teach me more, obviously I need it 😊🥰🤨

Fascinating. Could you kindly share your resources for this reconstruction? Thanks 🙏

17:28 I have genuine interest in this if you're considering another series to work on. I think this is highly interesting stuff for all sorts of people from conlanger to curious.

Hi Simon! Love your work :) I've always had this doubt but never really asked anyone. Has the comparative method changed much since its inception in the xix century or has it stayed mostly the same? And, if it did change, are old reconstructions revisited often? I don't know much about linguistics, I just took a course in uni, and google didn't help much

I'm pretty sure Polish has nasal vowels at the end of some groups of words where in Proto Indo European there would have been a nasal consonant.

Also if we compare India's Indo European languages they evolved very differently than other languages of the same family. like the case system fell in for a postposition system and now the postposition is tagged in spoken languages.