Download or read book The Ancient Languages of Europe written by Roger D. Woodard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-10 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, derived from the acclaimed Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, describes the ancient languages of Europe, for the convenience of students and specialists working in that area. Each chapter of the work focuses on an individual language or, in some instances, a set of closely related varieties of a language. Providing a full descriptive presentation, each of these chapters examines the writing system(s), phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of that language, and places the language within its proper linguistic and historical context. The volume brings together an international array of scholars, each a leading specialist in ancient language study. While designed primarily for scholars and students of linguistics, this work will prove invaluable to all whose studies take them into the realm of ancient language.
Download or read book The Languages and Linguistics of Europe written by Bernd Kortmann and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-07-27 with total page 934 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Open publicationThe Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The book supplies profiles of the language families of Europe, including the sign languages. It also discusses the areal typology, paying attention to the Standard Average European, Balkan, Baltic and Mediterranean convergence areas. Separate chapters deal with the old and new minority languages and with non-standard varieties. A major focus is language politics and policies, including discussions of the special status of English, the relation between language and the church, language and the school, and standardization. The history of European linguistics is another focus as is the history of multilingual European 'empires' and their dissolution. The volume is especially geared towards a graduate and advanced undergraduate readership. It has been designed such that it can be used, as a whole or in parts, as a textbook, the first of its kind, for graduate programmes with a focus on the linguistic (and linguistics) landscape of Europe.
Download or read book The Ancient Languages of Asia and the Americas written by Roger D. Woodard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-10 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A convenient, portable paperback derived from the acclaimed Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages.
Download or read book Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe written by Östen Dahl and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.
Download or read book Lingo written by Gaston Dorren and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six thousand years. Sixty languages. One “brisk and breezy” whirlwind armchair tour of Europe “bulg[ing] with linguistic trivia” (The Wall Street Journal). Take a trip of the tongue across the continent in this fascinating, hilarious and highly edifying exploration of the many ways and whys of Euro-speaks—its idiosyncrasies, its histories, commonalities, and differences. Most European languages are descended from a single ancestor, a language not unlike Sanskrit known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short), but the continent’s ever-changing borders and cultures have given rise to a linguistic and cultural diversity that is too often forgotten in discussions of Europe as a political entity. Lingo takes us into today’s remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that one never use the word “you.” “In this bubbly linguistic endeavor, journalist and polyglot Dorren thoughtfully walks readers through the weird evolution of languages” (Publishers Weekly), and not just the usual suspects—French, German, Yiddish, irish, and Spanish, Here, too are the esoteric—Manx, Ossetian, Esperanto, Gagauz, and Sami, and that global headache called English. In its sixty bite-sized chapters, Dorret offers quirky and hilarious tidbits of illuminating facts, and also dispels long-held lingual misconceptions (no, Eskimos do not have 100 words for snow). Guaranteed to change the way you think about language, Lingo is a “lively and insightful . . . unique, page-turning book” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).
Download or read book Archaeology and Language written by Colin Renfrew and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1990-01-26 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 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.
Download or read book The Indo European Languages written by Anna Giacalone Ramat and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-29 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo European Linguistics written by Jared Klein and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 1025 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the most comprehensive coverage of the field of Indo-European Linguistics in a century, focusing on the entire Indo-European family and treating each major branch and most minor languages. The collaborative work of 120 scholars from 22 countries, Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics combines the exhaustive coverage of an encyclopedia with the in-depth treatment of individual monographic studies.
Download or read book Perfects in Indo European Languages and Beyond written by Robert Crellin and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 702 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a detailed investigation of perfects from all the branches of the Indo-European language family, in some cases representing the first ever comprehensive description. Thorough philological examinations result in empirically well-founded analyses illustrated with over 940 examples. The unique temporal depth and diatopic breadth of attested Indo-European languages permits the investigation of both TAME (Tense-Aspect-Mood-Evidentiality) systems over time and recurring cycles of change, as well as synchronic patterns of areal distribution and contact phenomena. These possibilities are fully exploited in the volume. Furthermore, the cross-linguistic perspective adopted by many authors, as well as the inclusion of contributions which go beyond the boundaries of the Indo-European family per se, facilitates typological comparison. As such, the volume is intended to serve as a springboard for future research both into the semantics of the perfect in Indo-European itself, and verb systems across the world’s languages.
Download or read book Indo European Linguistics written by James Clackson and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indo-European language family consists of many of the modern and ancient languages of Europe, India and Central Asia, including Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, German, French, Spanish and English. Spoken by an estimated three billion people, it has the largest number of native speakers in the world today. This textbook provides an accessible introduction to the study of the Indo-European languages. It clearly sets out the methods for relating the languages to one another, presents an engaging discussion of the current debates and controversies concerning their classification, and offers sample problems and suggestions for how to solve them. Complete with a comprehensive glossary, almost 100 tables in which language data and examples are clearly laid out, suggestions for further reading, discussion points, and a range of exercises, this text will be an essential toolkit for all those studying historical linguistics, language typology and the Indo-European languages for the first time.
Download or read book Languages in prehistoric Europe written by Alfred Bammesberger and published by Universitatsverlag Winter. This book was released on 2003 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the advent of writing and before the development of the Indo-European language, Europe enjoyed much greater linguistic diversity with a whole host of other languages (Hispanic, Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, to name but a few) which are now defunct. This collection of nineteen papers from a conference held at the Katholische Universitat Eichstatt in Germany in 1999, examine this diversity from archaeological (two papers) and linguistic perspectives. Contributors include: Robert S P Beekes, Ivo Hajnal, Petri Kallio, Thomas Lindner, Oswald Panagl, Colin Renfrew, Klaus Strunk and Juergen Untermann. Papers in English and German.
Download or read book Indo European Linguistics written by James Clackson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-18 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indo-European language family consists of many of the modern and ancient languages of Europe, India and Central Asia, including Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, German, French, Spanish and English. Spoken by an estimated three billion people, it has the largest number of native speakers in the world today. This textbook provides an accessible introduction to the study of the Indo-European languages. It clearly sets out the methods for relating the languages to one another, presents an engaging discussion of the current debates and controversies concerning their classification, and offers sample problems and suggestions for how to solve them. Complete with a comprehensive glossary, almost 100 tables in which language data and examples are clearly laid out, suggestions for further reading, discussion points, and a range of exercises, this text will be an essential toolkit for all those studying historical linguistics, language typology and the Indo-European languages for the first time.
Download or read book History of the European Languages written by Alexander Murray and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 2002 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Murray's account of the original language of Europe is an extension of Horne Tooke's ideas on language. In this two-volume work Murray sets out what he calls the general rules of philological analysis. The book offers an intriguing insight into the state of language studies in the interim period between Sir William Jones's announcement of the general affinity between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin (1786) and the publication of the German philologist Franz Bopp's detailed study of the conjugation systems of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian and German (1833-52). This sought-after work on the study of language is an essential tool for historians of 19th-century language.
Download or read book The Search for the Perfect Language written by Umberto Eco and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1997-04-08 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that there once existed a language which perfectly and unambiguously expressed the essence of all possible things and concepts has occupied the minds of philosophers, theologians, mystics and others for at least two millennia. This is an investigation into the history of that idea and of its profound influence on European thought, culture and history. From the early Dark Ages to the Renaissance it was widely believed that the language spoken in the Garden of Eden was just such a language, and that all current languages were its decadent descendants from the catastrophe of the Fall and at Babel. The recovery of that language would, for theologians, express the nature of divinity, for cabbalists allow access to hidden knowledge and power, and for philosophers reveal the nature of truth. Versions of these ideas remained current in the Enlightenment, and have recently received fresh impetus in attempts to create a natural language for artificial intelligence. The story that Umberto Eco tells ranges widely from the writings of Augustine, Dante, Descartes and Rousseau, arcane treatises on cabbalism and magic, to the history of the study of language and its origins. He demonstrates the initimate relation between language and identity and describes, for example, how and why the Irish, English, Germans and Swedes - one of whom presented God talking in Swedish to Adam, who replied in Danish, while the serpent tempted Eve in French - have variously claimed their language as closest to the original. He also shows how the late eighteenth-century discovery of a proto-language (Indo-European) for the Aryan peoples was perverted to support notions of racial superiority. To this subtle exposition of a history of extraordinary complexity, Umberto Eco links the associated history of the manner in which the sounds of language and concepts have been written and symbolized. Lucidly and wittily written, the book is, in sum, a tour de force of scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European History. The paperback edition of this book is not available through Blackwell outside of North America.
Download or read book The Horse the Wheel and Language written by David W. Anthony and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-26 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization. Linking prehistoric archaeological remains with the development of language, David Anthony identifies the prehistoric peoples of central Eurasia's steppe grasslands as the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and shows how their innovative use of the ox wagon, horseback riding, and the warrior's chariot turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange. He explains how they spread their traditions and gave rise to important advances in copper mining, warfare, and patron-client political institutions, thereby ushering in an era of vibrant social change. Anthony also describes his fascinating discovery of how the wear from bits on ancient horse teeth reveals the origins of horseback riding. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries--the source of the Indo-European languages and English--and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.
Download or read book Tense and Aspect in Indo European Languages written by John Hewson and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph presents a general picture of the evolution of IE verbal systems within a coherent cognitive framework. The work encompasses all the language families of the IE phylum, from prehistory to present day languages. Inspired by the ideas of Roman Jakobson and Gustave Guillaume the authors relate tense and aspect to underlying cognitive processes, and show that verbal systems have a staged development of time representations (chronogenesis). They view linguistic change as systemic and trace the evolution of the earliest tense systems by (a) aspectual split and (b) aspectual merger from the original aspectual contrasts of PIE, the evidence for such systemic change showing clearly in the paradigmatic morphology of the daughter languages. The nineteen chapters cover first the ancient documentation, then those families whose historical data are from a more recent date. The last chapters deal with the systemic evolution of languages that are descended from ancient forbears such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and are completed by a chapter on the practical and theoretical conclusions of the work.
Download or read book Tracing the Indo Europeans written by Birgit Anette Olsen and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2019-08-23 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent developments in aDNA has reshaped our understanding of later European prehistory, and at the same time also opened up for more fruitful collaborations between archaeologists and historical linguists. Two revolutionary genetic studies, published independently in Nature, 2015, showed that prehistoric Europe underwent two successive waves of migration, one from Anatolia consistent with the introduction of agriculture, and a later influx from the Pontic-Caspian steppes which without any reasonable doubt pinpoints the archaeological Yamnaya complex as the cradle of (Core-)Indo-European languages. Now, for the first time, when the preliminaries are clear, it is possible for the fields of genetics, archaeology and historical linguistics to cooperate in a constructive fashion to refine our knowledge of the Indo-European homeland, migrations, society and language. For the historical-comparative linguists, this opens up a wealth of exciting perspectives and new working fields in the intersections between linguistics and neighbouring disciplines, for the archaeologists and geneticists, on the other hand, the linguistic contributions help to endow the material findings with a voice from the past. The present selection of papers illustrate the importance of an open interdisciplinary discussion which will gradually help us in our quest of Tracing the Indo-Europeans.
