The Precursors of Proto-Indo-European contains sixteen contributions that offer the newest insights into the prehistory of Proto-Indo-European, taking the Indo-Anatolian and the Indo-Uralic hypotheses as their point of departure.
The Precursors of Proto-Indo-European contains sixteen contributions that offer the newest insights into the prehistory of Proto-Indo-European, taking the Indo-Anatolian and the Indo-Uralic hypotheses as their point of departure.
The authors introduce Proto-Indo-European describing its construction and revealing the people who spoke it between 5,500 and 8,000 years ago. Using archaeological evidence and natural history they reconstruct the lives, passions, culture, society and mythology of the Proto-Indo-Europeans.
Situated at the crossroads of comparative philology, classics and general historical linguistics, this study is the first ever attempt to outline in full the developments which led from the remotest recoverable stages of the Indo-European proto-language to the complex verbal system encountered in Homer and other early Greek texts. By combining the methods of comparative and internal reconstruction with a careful examination of large collections of primary data and insights gained from the study of language change and linguistic typology, Andreas Willi uncovers the deeper reasons behind many surface irregularities and offers a new understanding of how categories such as aspect, tense and voice interact. Drawing upon evidence from all major branches of Indo-European, and providing exhaustive critical coverage of scholarly debate on the most controversial issues, this book will be an essential reference tool for anyone seeking orientation in this burgeoning but increasingly fragmented area of linguistic research.
In Anatolian Verbal Stem Formation, David Sasseville offers an extensive classification of the Luwian, Lycian and Lydian verbal stem classes. This serves as a basis for reconstructing the Proto-Luwic stage and subsequent comparison with Hittite, providing new insights into the Proto-Anatolian verbal system and by extension into the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. Besides its contribution to the study of verbal morphology, the present book also provides significant insights into the philology of the Anatolian languages. The detailed analyses of the synchronic data, including a philological survey of verbal forms and paradigms for the individual stem classes, enhance our understanding of Luwian, Lycian and Lydian and thereby benefit the fields of Hittitology and other studies on the Classical period in Asia Minor.
This volume discusses topics of historical syntax from different theoretical perspectives, ranging from Indo-European studies to generative grammar, functionalism, and typology. It examines mechanisms of syntactic change such as reanalysis, analogy, grammaticalization, independent drift, and language contact, as well as procedures of syntactic reconstruction. More than one factor is considered to explain a syntactic phenomenon, since it is maintained that an accurate account of multiple causations, of both structural and social nature, is to be preferred to considerations of economy. Special attention is given to the relationship between principles of syntactic theory and a search for data reliability through the methods of corpus linguistics. Data are drawn from a variety of languages, including Hittite, Vedic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Romance, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Austroasiatic, Gulf of Guinea creoles. The book may be therefore of interest for specialists of these languages in addition to scholars and advanced students of syntax and historical linguistics.
This volume consists of revised versions of presentations given at a roundtable on “New Directions for Historical Linguistics: Impact and Synthesis, 50 Years Later” held at the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics in San Antonio, Texas, in 2017, as well as an introduction by the editors. The roundtable discussed the evolution of historical linguistics since the 1966 symposium on “Directions for Historical Linguistics,” held in Austin, Texas. Six prominent scholars of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics contributed: William Labov (the only surviving author from the 1968 volume), Gillian Sankoff, Elizabeth Traugott, Brian Joseph, Sarah Thomason, and Paul Hopper (a graduate student assistant at the original symposium).
"How can we explain metrical irregularities in Homeric phrases like [androtēta kai ēbēn]? What do such phrases tell us about the antiquity of the epic tradition? And how did doublet forms such as [tetratos] beside [tetartos] originate? In this book, you will find the first systematic and complete account of the syllabic liquids in Ancient Greek. It provides an up-to-date, comprehensive and innovative etymological treatment of material from all dialects, including Mycenaean. A new model of linguistic change in the epic tradition is used to tackle two hotly-debated problems: metrical irregularities in Homer (including muta cum liquida) and the double reflex. The proposed solution has important consequences for Greek dialect classification and the prehistory of Epic language and meter"--
Dispersals and diversification offers linguistic and archaeological perspectives on the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Two chapters discuss the early phases of the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European from an archaeological perspective, integrating and interpreting the new evidence from ancient DNA. Six chapters analyse the intricate relationship between the Anatolian branch of Indo-European, probably the first one to separate, and the remaining branches. Three chapters are concerned with the most important unsolved problems of Indo-European subgrouping, namely the status of the postulated Italo-Celtic and Graeco-Armenian subgroups. Two chapters discuss methodological problems with linguistic subgrouping and with the attempt to correlate linguistics and archaeology. Contributors are David W. Anthony, Rasmus Bjørn, José L. García Ramón, Riccardo Ginevra, Adam Hyllested, James A. Johnson, Kristian Kristiansen, H. Craig Melchert, Matthew Scarborough, Peter Schrijver, Matilde Serangeli, Zsolt Simon, Rasmus Thorsø, Michael Weiss.
This book challenges media-celebrated evolutionary studies linking Indo-European languages to Neolithic Anatolia, instead defending traditional practices in historical linguistics.