Reconstructed vocabulary
Through comparative linguistics it is possible to reconstruct the
vocabulary found in the proto-language, and in this way achieve
knowledge of the cultural, technological and ecological context that the
speakers inhabited. Such a context can then be compared with
archaeological evidence. This vocabulary includes, in the case of (late)
PIE, which is based on the post-Anatolian and post-Tocharian IE-
languages:
pastoralism, including domesticated cattle, horses, and dogs[35]
agriculture and cereal cultivation, including technology commonly
ascribed to late-Neolithic farming communities, e.g., the plow[36]
a climate with winter snow[37]
transportation by or across water[35]
the solid wheel[35] used for wagons, but not
yet chariots with spoked wheels[38]Zsolt Simon notes that, although it can be useful to determine the
period when the Proto-Indo-European language was spoken, using the
reconstructed vocabulary to locate the homeland may be flawed, since
we do not know whether Proto-Indo-European speakers knew a specific
concept because it was part of their environment or because they had
heard of it from other peoples they were interacting with.[39]
Uralic, Caucasian and Semitic borrowings
Proto-Finno-Ugric and PIE have a lexicon in common, generally related
to trade, such as words for "price" and "draw, lead". Similarly, "sell"
and "wash" were borrowed in Proto-Ugric. Although some have
proposed a common ancestor (the hypothetical Nostratic macrofamily),
this is generally regarded as the result of intensive borrowing, which