Indo-European copula copula (with corresponding voiceless and voiced fricatives) existed side by side in Germanic, and the involvement of a separate root "" is unnecessary. The root "*(s)teh-" meant "to stand". From this root comes the present stem of the so-called "substantive verb" in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, "tá" and "tha" respectively. On the absence of the initial s- in Celtic, see Indo-European s-mobile. In Latin, "stō, stare" retained the meaning "to stand", until local forms of Vulgar Latin began to use it as a copula in certain circumstances. Today, this survives in that several Romance languages (Galician-Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan) use it
Proto-Indo-European language Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages" (1874–77) represented an early attempt to reconstruct the proto-Indo-European language. By the early 1900s Indo-Europeanists had developed well-defined descriptions of PIE which scholars still accept today. Later, the discovery of the Anatolian and Tocharian languages added to the corpus of descendant languages. A new principle won wide acceptance in the laryngeal theory, which explained irregularities in the linguistic reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European phonology as the effects of hypothetical sounds which had disappeared from all documented languages, but which were later observed in excavated cuneiform tablets in Anatolian. Julius Pokorny's "Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch" ("Indo-European Etymological Dictionary", 1959)