Questions on the timing and the center of the Indo-European language dispersal are central to debates on the formation of the European and Asian linguistic landscapes and are deeply intertwined with questions on the archaeology and population history of these continents. Recent palaeogenomic studies support scenarios in which the core Indo-European languages spread with the expansion of Early Bronze Age Yamnaya herders that originally inhabited the East European steppes. Questions on the Yamnaya and Pre-Yamnaya locations of the language community that ultimately gave rise to the Indo-European language family are heavily dependent on linguistic reconstruction of the subsistence of Proto-Indo-European speakers. A central question, therefore, is how important the role of agriculture was among the speakers of this protolanguage. In this study, we perform a qualitative etymological analysis of all previously postulated Proto-Indo-European terminology related to cereal cultivation and cereal processing. On the basis of the evolution of the subsistence strategies of consecutive stages of the protolanguage, we find that one or perhaps two cereal terms can be reconstructed for the basal Indo-European stage, also known as Indo-Anatolian, but that core Indo-European, here also including Tocharian, acquired a more elaborate set of terms. Thus, we linguistically document an important economic shift from a mostly non-agricultural to a mixed agro-pastoral economy between the basal and core Indo-European speech communities. It follows that the early, eastern Yamnaya of the Don-Volga steppe, with its lack of evidence for agricultural practices, does not offer a perfect archaeological proxy for the core Indo-European language community and that this stage of the language family more likely reflects a mixed subsistence as proposed for western Yamnaya groups around or to the west of the Dnieper River.

In this paper we present a diachronically syntactic analysis of the PIE verbal root *sneigʷʰ-, arguing that it did not originally mean 'to snow', in the proto-language, but rather more primarily 'to fall down'. Evidence from several Indo-European branches is evaluated and argued to support a scenario in which the former meaning arose from the latter in a so-called impersonal verbal construction.

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The Classical Latin necesse , occurring approximately twenty-five times in manuscripts from 186 BC through the 15th century as the form necessum / necessus , has resisted definitive analysis. We begin by reviewing proposed etymologies and suggest that a root in ne + ced-t-(a derivative of cēdo ) is the most defensible. Next we propose that necesse is the oldest of the forms, predating neces[s]us in the SC de Bacch . by approximately twenty years. While necessum seems explainable through analogical replacement of the less common 3rd declension adjectival form with the more common 2nd declension one, encouraged by impersonal constructions, it is the necessus form that requires more in-depth analysis. While reasonably a neuter like opus or genus , an analysis of the seven attested examples leads us to suggest the form is actually a masculine nominative elevated to semi-personal status through a linguistic tendency within Latin for personalization or "subjectivization." Further, considering necessus and necessum , we find evidence of sociolinguistic and temporal trends, linked perhaps with Latin becoming an L2, within the forms' geographic and chronological distributions.