Comparative Historical Dialectology

This brief monograph explores the historical motivations for two sets of phonological changes in some varieties of Romance: restructured voicing of intervocalic /p t k/, and palatalization of initial /l/ and /n/. These developments have been treated repeatedly over the decades, yet neither has enjoyed a satisfactory solution. This book attempts to demonstrate that both outcomes are ultimately attributable to the loss of early pan-Romance consonant gemination.This study is of interest not only to the language-specific field of historical Romance linguistics, but also to general historical linguistics. The central problems examined here constitute classic cases of questions that cannot be answered by confining analysis solely to the individual languages under investigation. The passage of time, the indirect nature of fragmentary and accidental documentation, and the nature of the changes themselves conspire to deny access to the most essential facts. However, comparison of closely cognate languages now undergoing change supplies a perspective for discerning conditions that may ultimately lead to states achieved in the distant past by the languages under investigation.

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.

In this volume of 29 papers, readers interested in language variation and historical linguistics will find interesting theoretical proposals as well as suggestions concerning ways of approaching previously unsolved empirical problems in the field. The papers deal with various aspects of historical regional dialectology, and some border on the issue of dialectology and linguistic change. Although many deal with English, a number discuss Romance languages in general as well as Norwegian, German, relic languages of the eastern Alpine region, Coptic, and Fox. Some are devoted to more general issues. The language specific contributions also often cover areas of a more general nature. The results indicate new vistas for further productive research in the area of historical dialectology.

Historical and comparative linguistics has been a major scholarly discipline for 200 years, and yet this is the first dictionary ever devoted to it. With nearly 2400 entries, this dictionary covers every aspect of the subject, from the most venerable work to the exciting advances of the last few years, many of which have not even made it into textbooks yet.All of the traditional terms are here, but so are the terms only introduced recently, in connection with such varied subjects as pidgin and creole languages, the sociolinguistic study of language change, mathematical and computational methods, the novel approaches to linguistic geography, the controversial proposals of new and vast language families, and the attempts at relating the results of the historical linguists to those of the archaeologists, the anthropologists and the geneticists.More than just a dictionary, this book provides genuine linguistic examples of most of the terms entered, detailed explanations of fundamental concepts, critical assessment of controversial ideas, cross-references to related terms, and an abundance of references to the original literature.Features:*The first dictionary in the field.*Comprehensive coverage.*Clearly written and accurate entries.*Covers traditional and contemporary terminology.*Provides linguistic examples of terms defined.*Supplies numerous cross-references to related terms.*Includes hundreds of references to the original literature.

This book, by a group of leading international scholars, outlines the history of the spoken dialects of Arabic from the Arab Conquests of the seventh century up to the present day. It specifically investigates the evolution of Arabic as a spoken language, in contrast to the many existing studies that focus on written Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. The volume begins with a discursive introduction that deals with important issues in the general scholarly context, including the indigenous myth and probable reality of the history of Arabic; Arabic dialect geography and typology; types of internally and externally motivated linguistic change; social indexicalisation; and pidginization and creolization in Arabic-speaking communities. Most chapters then focus on developments in a specific region - Mauritania, the Maghreb, Egypt, the Levant, the Northern Fertile Crescent, the Gulf, and South Arabia - with one exploring Judaeo-Arabic, a group of varieties historically spread over a wider area. The remaining two chapters in the volume examine individual linguistic features of particular historical interest and controversy, specifically the origin and evolution of the b- verbal prefix, and the adnominal linker -an/-in. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of the linguistic and social history of Arabic as well as to comparative linguists interested in topics such as linguistic typology and language change.