Baltica

This volume offers a discussion of the phonological, accentological and morphological development of the Baltic languages and their Indo-European origins. The first half of this book is about Baltic historical phonology and morphology and the second half is about Prussian. The emphasis is on the relative chronology of sound changes and on the development of the flexional and derivational categories of nouns, pronouns and verbs. It is argued that the Balto-Slavic acute tone was a glottal stop which developed from the Indo-European laryngeals and from Winter's law and that the original circumflex continues other vocalic sequences. Special points of attention are the gen.pl. endings, ē and ī/jā stems, and thematic and athematic present endings. The second half of the book contains a comparative analysis of the three Prussian catechisms, resulting in the conclusion that they represent three consecutive stages of a real linguistic system. It includes a discussion of the Prussian accent shift, initial vowels, diphthongs, infinitives, verb classes, participles and traces of ablauting paradigms. The final part of the book offers a full linguistic interpretation of the three Prussian catechisms on the basis of the preceding chapters, followed by a list of references and a word index. The book is of interest to Balticists, Slavicists, Indo-Europeanists, and other historical linguists.

Ancient Supercontinents and the Paleogeography of Earth offers a systematic examination of Precambrian cratons and supercontinents. Through detailed maps of drift histories and paleogeography of each continent, this book examines topics related to Earth’s tectonic evolution prior to Pangea, including plate kinematics, orogenic development, and paleoenvironments. Additionally, this book discusses the methodologies used, principally paleomagnetism and tectonostratigraphy, and addresses geophysical topics of mantle dynamics and geodynamo evolution over billions of years. Structured clearly with consistent coverage for Precambrian cratons, this book combines state-of-the-art paleomagnetic and geochronologic data to reconstruct the paleogeography of the Earth in the context of major climatic events such as global glaciations. It is an ideal, up-to-date reference for geoscientists and geographers looking for answers to questions surrounding the tectonic evolution of Earth. Provides robust paleogeographies of Precambrian cratons based on high-quality paleomagnetic and geochronologic data and critically tested by global geological datasets Includes links to updated databases for the Precambrian such as PALEOMAGIA and the Global Paleomagnetic Database (GPMDB) Presents full-color maps of the drift histories of each continent as well as their paleogeographies Discusses key questions regarding continental drift, the supercontinent cycle, and the geomagnetic dipole hypothesis and analyzes palaeography in the context of Earth’s holistic evolution