The article investigates the agricultural lexicon of Indo-Iranian, especially its earlier records, and what it may tell us about the spread of farming. After some general remarks on “Neolithic” vocabulary, a short overview of the animal husbandry terminology shows that this field of vocabulary was evidently well-established in Proto-Indo-Iranian, with many cognate terms. Words for cattle, horses, sheep and goats are well developed and mostly inherited, while evidence for pigs is more limited, ad the words for donkey and camel look like common loans. A more extensive discussion of plant terminology reveals that while some generic terms for grain are inherited, more specific words for different kinds of cereals show few inherited terms and/or irregular variation, and the same is even clearer for pulses and some other vegetables. The terminology for agricultural terminology is largely different from that of most European branches of Indo-European. The conclusion is that the cultural background behind these linguistic data points to spreading of a mainly pastoralist culture in the case of Indo-Iranian.

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In this article, the methodology of protolanguage reconstruction and its application to Proto-Germanic (PG) are discussed, with emphasis on the special case of an intermediate protolanguage and the problem of parallel changes in daughter languages. Then, a short description of PG and its reconstruction is given. The main focus is on phonology (section 2). Section 2.1 is a description of PG phonology as it can be reconstructed: first the segmental inventory (vowels and consonants), then suprasegmentals (accent, quantity, and syllables) and morphophonology. In section 2.2, the most important phonological changes relevant for PG are given, including some common post-PG developments. Section 3 treats PG inflectional morphology: After a short general characterization, section 3.1 describes nominal morphology, discussing inflectional categories and special features of nouns, adjectives, and pronouns, including some example paradigms of nouns. Section 3.2 deals with verbal morphology: After a discussion of the inflectional categories, the main features of morphological classes are described—mainly the characteristics of “strong” and “weak” verbs and their subclasses, followed by so-called preterite-presents and further irregular verbs, with example paradigms of one strong and one weak verb. In section 4, some short remarks on syntax follow. Section 5 discusses lexical reconstruction, especially cases of limited distribution in the daughter branches, showing that the availability of Indo-European comparanda often helps. It also treats language contact and borrowing relations of PG, both into PG (from Celtic or possible substrates) and from PG (into Saamic, Finnic, and Slavonic), as well as the hypothesis of Semitic influence.