The Prehistory of Languages
Author: Mary R. Haas
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2018-12-03
Total Pages: 120
ISBN-13: 3110881640
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNo detailed description available for "The Prehistory of Languages".
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In Hot Pursuit of Language in Prehistory
Author: John D. Bengtson
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 500
ISBN-13: 9027232520
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCompiled in honor and celebration of veteran anthropologist Harold C. Fleming, this book contains 23 articles by anthropologists (in the general sense) from the four main disciplines of prehistory: archaeology, biogenetics, paleoanthropology, and genetic (historical) linguistics. Because of Professor Fleming's major focus on language he founded the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory and the journal Mother Tongue the content of the book is heavily tilted toward the study of human language, its origins, historical development, and taxonomy. Because of Fleming's extensive field experience in Africa some of the articles deal with African topics. This volume is intended to exemplify the principle, in the words of Fleming himself, that each of the four disciplines is enriched when it combines with any one of the other four. The authors are representative of the cutting edge of their respective fields, and this book is unusual in including contributions from a wide range of anthropological fields rather than concentrating in any one of them.
The History of Languages
Author: Tore Janson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 0199604282
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDoes not discuss the Semitic languages.
Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages
Author: Peter Forster
Publisher: McDonald Institute Monographs
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 218
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEvolutionary ('phylogenetic') trees were first used to infer lost histories nearly two centuries ago by manuscript scholars reconstructing original texts. Today, computer methods are enabling phylogenetic trees to transform genetics, historical linguistics and even the archaeological study of artefact shapes and styles. But which phylogenetic methods are best suited to retracing the evolution of languages? And which types of language data are most informative about deep prehistory? In this book, leading specialists engage with these key questions. Essential reading for linguists, geneticists and archaeologists, these studies demonstrate how phylogenetic tools are illuminating previously intractable questions about language prehistory. This innovative volume arose from a conference of linguists, geneticists and archaeologists held at Cambridge in 2004.
Speak: A Short History of Languages
Author: Tore Janson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2002-03-14
Total Pages: 327
ISBN-13: 0191622907
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is a history of human speech from prehistory to the present. It charts the rise of some languages and the fall of others, explaining why some survive and others die. It shows how languages change their sounds and meanings, and how the history of languages is closely linked to the history of peoples. Writing in a lively, readable style, distinguished Swedish scholar Tore Janson makes no assumptions about previous knowledge. He takes the reader on a voyage of exploration through the changing patterns of the world's languages, from ancient China to ancient Egypt, imperial Rome to imperial Britain, Sappho's Lesbos to contemporary Africa. He discovers the links between the histories of societies and their languages; he shows how language evolved from primitive calls; he considers the question of whether one language can be more advanced than another. The author describes the history of writing and looks at the impact of changing technology. He ends by assessing the prospects for English world domination and predicting the languages of the distant future. Five historical maps illustrate this fascinating history of our defining characteristic and most valuable asset.
History of Language
Author: Steven Roger Fischer
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2004-10-03
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 1861895941
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIt is tempting to take the tremendous rate of contemporary linguistic change for granted. What is required, in fact, is a radical reinterpretation of what language is. Steven Roger Fischer begins his book with an examination of the modes of communication used by dolphins, birds and primates as the first contexts in which the concept of "language" might be applied. As he charts the history of language from the times of Homo erectus, Neanderthal humans and Homo sapiens through to the nineteenth century, when the science of linguistics was developed, Fischer analyses the emergence of language as a science and its development as a written form. He considers the rise of pidgin, creole, jargon and slang, as well as the effects radio and television, propaganda, advertising and the media are having on language today. Looking to the future, he shows how electronic media will continue to reshape and re-invent the ways in which we communicate. "[a] delightful and unexpectedly accessible book ... a virtuoso tour of the linguistic world."—The Economist "... few who read this remarkable study will regard language in quite the same way again."—The Good Book Guide
Archaeology and Language
Author: Colin Renfrew
Publisher: CUP Archive
Published: 1990-01-26
Total Pages: 372
ISBN-13: 9780521386753
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this book Colin Renfrew directs remarkable new light on the links between archaeology and language, looking specifically at the puzzling similarities that are apparent across the Indo-European family of ancient languages, from Anatolia and Ancient Persia, across Europe and the Indian subcontinent, to regions as remote as Sinkiang in China. Professor Renfrew initiates an original synthesis between modern historical linguistics and the new archaeology of cultural process, boldly proclaiming that it is time to reconsider questions of language origins and what they imply about ethnic affiliation--issues seriously discredited by the racial theorists of the 1920s and 1930s and, as a result, largely neglected since. Challenging many familiar beliefs, he comes to a new and persuasive conclusion: that primitive forms of the Indo-European language were spoken across Europe some thousands of years earlier than has previously been assumed.
Language Contacts in Prehistory
Author: Henning Andersen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 310
ISBN-13: 9781588113795
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEvery language includes layers of lexical and grammatical elements that entered it at different times in the more or less distant past. Hence, for periods preceding our earliest historical documentation, linguistic stratigraphy the systematic study of such layers may yield information about the prehistory of a given tradition of speaking in a variety of ways. For instance, irregular phonological reflexes may be evidence of the convergence of diverse dialects in the formation of a language, and layers of material from different source languages may form a record of changing cultural contacts in the past. In this volume are discussed past problems and current advances in the stratigraphy of Indo-European, African, Southeast Asian, Australian, Oceanic, Japanese, and Meso-American languages.
Empires of the Word
Author: Nicholas Ostler
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2005-06-28
Total Pages: 644
ISBN-13: 0066210860
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe story of the world in the last five thousand years is above all the story of its languages. Some shared language is what binds any community together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. Yet the history of the world's great languages has been very little told. Empires of the Word, by the wide-ranging linguist Nicholas Ostler, is the first to bring together the tales in all their glorious variety: the amazing innovations in education, culture, and diplomacy devised by speakers of Sumerian and its successors in the Middle East, right up to the Arabic of the present day; the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions; the charmed progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the engaging self-regard of Greek; the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and the global spread of English. Besides these epic ahievements, language failures are equally fascinating: Why did German get left behind? Why did Egyptian, which had survived foreign takeovers for three millennia, succumb to Mohammed's Arabic? Why is Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia, though the Netherlands had ruled the East Indies for as long as the British ruled India? As this book splendidly and authoritatively reveals, the language history of the world shows eloquently the real character of peoples; and, for all the recent tehnical mastery of English, nothing guarantees our language's long-term preeminence. The language future, like the language past, will be full of surprises.
Archaeology, Language, and the African Past
Author: R. Blench
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 392
ISBN-13: 9780759104662
DOWNLOAD EBOOKScholarly work that attempts to match linguistic and archaeological evidence in precolonial Africa
