The Indo-European Phonological Inventory Database collects the phonemic inventories of the ancient and attested Indo-European languages. Every record in the database is linked to an ancient language and it contains the consonant and vowel inventories of the language. Go to the page Languages to explore the database. This page lists all the languages in the database and every column is sortable. It is possible to search which language includes which phoneme using the phoneme Search page.
The informations about the inventories were gathered from a variety of sources that are listed in every record. The authors of the records did not pursue any new analysis from the references, but limited themselves to present the analysis in table form. Several problems arise when dealing with such different sources: very often, the source does not follow the standards of the International Phonetic Association and in most cases it is unclear or ambiguous regarding some aspects of the analysis (such as the phonemic status of some phones/allophones). A second problem is related to the presence of multiple inventories for the same language proposed in different sources. In all those cases, the author of the record presents the unclear/missing points under the note section and it chooses the most reliable/clear source if different analysis are present.
For comments and/or suggestions, write to the coordinator's email. If you want to cite the database, we recommend the following citation:
Luraghi, Silvia and Stefano Coretta (eds.). 2013. Indo-European Phonological Database. Pavia: Università degli Studi di Pavia.
For the citation of a single record, for example:
Coretta, Stefano. 2013. Latin. In Luraghi, Silvia and Stefano Coretta (eds.), Indo-European Phonological Database, Pavia: Università degli Studi di Pavia.
This database was inspired by the South American Phonological Inventories Database, available at linguistics.berkeley.edu/~saphon/en/.
Supervisor: Silvia Luraghi (University of Pavia)
Coordinator: Stefano Coretta (email: myname <dot> mysurname <at> me <dot> com)
Contributors: Antonella Calaresu, Mattia Canavesi, Adriano Cerri, Tommaso Claudi, Ángel López Chala, Fabio Massimo D'Amato, Elena Di Venosa, Federica Lini, Maria Molina, Erica Pinelli, Letizia Vezzosi.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.