Full Description
Modern languages like English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi as well as ancient languages like Greek, Latin and Sanskrit all belong to the Indo-European language family, which means that they all descend from a common ancestor. But how, more precisely, are the Indo-European languages related to each other? This book brings together pioneering research from a team of international scholars to address this fundamental question. It provides an introduction to linguistic subgrouping as well as offering comprehensive, systematic and up-to-date analyses of the ten main branches of the Indo-European language family: Anatolian, Tocharian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic. By highlighting that these branches are saliently different from each other, yet at the same time display striking similarities, the book demonstrates the early diversification of the Indo-European language family, spoken today by half the world's population. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Contents
1. Introduction Thomas Olander; 2. Methodology in linguistic subgrouping James Clackson; 3. Computational approaches to linguistic chronology and subgrouping Dariusz Piwowarczyk; 4. What we can (and can't) learn from computational cladistics Don Ringe; 5. Anatolian Alwin Kloekhorst; 6. Tocharian Michaël Peyrot; 7. Italo-Celtic Michael Weiss; 8. Italic Michael Weiss; 9. Celtic Anders Richardt Jørgensen; 10. Germanic Bjarne Simmelkjær Sandgaard Hansen & Guus Jan Kroonen; 11. Greek Lucien van Beek; 12. Armenian Birgit Anette Olsen & Rasmus Thorsø; 13. Albanian Adam Hyllested & Brian D. Joseph; 14. Indo-Iranian Martin Joachim Kümmel; 15. Balto-Slavic Tijmen Pronk.
