Indo European Nostratic And Beyond

Vitalij Viktorovich Shevoroshkin: Selected PublicationsRaimo Anttila: Beating a Goddess out of the Bush?Vaclav Blazek: Indo European 'Seven?Claude Pierre Boisson: The Phonotactics of SumerianJ. C. Catford: The Myth of the Primordial ClickMadhav M. Deshpande: Panini and the Distinctive FeaturesJoseph H. Greenberg: Does Altaic Exist?Eric P. Hamp: A Far Out EquationIren Hegedis: On Grammaticalization in NostraticPramila Hemrajani: Three KissesPeter Edwin Hook: Relative Clauses in Eastern ShinaVyacheslav Vs. Ivanov: Luwian Collective and Non Collective Neutral Nouns in ?arBrian D. Joseph: Macrorelationships and Microrelationships and their RelationshipMark Kaiser: Rigor or Vigor?Whither Distant Linguistic Comparison?Leonid Kulikov: Vedic mriyate and other pseudo passives?Notes on an Accent ShiftAlexis Manaster Ramer: The Polygenesis of Western Yiddish?and the Monogenesis of YiddishKarl Heinrich Menges: Etymological Problems with Words for 'Blood? in Nostratic and Beyond.Peter A. Michalove: Altaic Evidence for Clusters in NostraticVladimir Orel: New Albanian Etymologies (Balkan Etymologies 116 145)Ilya Peiros: Macro Families?Can a Mistake Be Detected?Richard A. Rhodes: On Pronominal SystemsMerritt Ruhlen: Proto Amerind *KAPA 'Finger, Hand? and Its Origin in the Old WorldSergei A. Starostin: On the ?Consonant Splits? in JapaneseAlexander Vovin: Some Japanese Etymologies.

The "Nostratic" hypothesis -- positing a common linguistic ancestor for a wide range of language families including Indo-European, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic -- has produced one of the most enduring and often intense controversies in linguistics. Overwhelmingly, though, both supporters of the hypothesis and those who reject it have not dealt directly with one another's arguments. This volume brings together selected representatives of both sides, as well as a number of agnostic historical linguists, with the aim of examining the evidence for this particular hypothesis in the context of distant genetic relationships generally.The volume contains discussion of variants of the Nostratic hypothesis (A. Bomhard; J. Greenberg; A. Manaster-Ramer, K. Baertsch, K. Adams, & P. Michalove), the mathematics of chance in determining the relationships posited for Nostratic (R. Oswa< D. Ringe), and the evidence from particular branches posited in Nostratic (L. Campbell; C. Hodge; A. Vovin), with responses and additional discussion by E. Hamp, B. Vine, W. Baxter and B. Comrie.

Setting out the historical national and religious characteristics of the Italians as they impact on the integration within the European Union, this study makes note of the two characteristics that have an adverse effect on Italian national identity: cleavages between north and south and the dominant role of family. It discusses how for Italians family loyalty is stronger than any other allegiance, including feelings towards their country, their nation, or the EU. Due to such subnational allegiances and values, this book notes that Italian civic society is weaker and engagement at the grass roots is less robust than one finds in other democracies, leaving politics in Italy largely in the hands of political parties. The work concludes by noting that EU membership, however, provides no magic bullet for Italy: it cannot change internal cleavages, the Italian worldview, and family values or the country’s mafia-dominated power matrix, and as a result, the underlying absence of fidelity to a shared polity—Italian or European—leave the country as ungovernable as ever.

The Indo-European Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the individual languages and language subgroups within this language family. With over four hundred languages and dialects and almost three billion native speakers, the Indo-European language family is the largest of the recognized language groups and includes most of the major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau and the Indian subcontinent. Written by an international team of experts, this comprehensive, single-volume tome presents in-depth discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistic features of the Indo-European languages. This unique resource remains the ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Indo-European linguistics and languages, but also for more experienced researchers looking for an up-to-date survey of separate Indo-European branches. It will be of interest to researchers and anyone with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology and language development.

This monograph presents a groundbreaking exploration into the Nostratic macrofamily, a concept that proposes a common ancestral language for several of the world's foremost language families. The study delves deep into the roots of Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Eskimo-Aleut, Indo-European, Kartvelian, and Uralic languages, offering a unique perspective on their interconnections and evolutionary paths. The authors examine five pivotal Nostratic etymons from the Swadesh index to illustrate the shared cognitive frameworks of these diverse linguistic groups. This research challenges conventional perspectives on language evolution and introduces new methodologies in cognitive macro-comparative studies. Key to the work is the hypothesis of divergent-convergent and convergent-divergent evolutionary patterns stemming from a common Nostratic origin. Beyond linguistics, this study offers insights into human cognitive development, language formation, and change mechanisms.

This book is an investigation of how semivowels were realised in Indo-European and in early Greek. More specifically, it examines the extent to which Indo-European *i and *y were independent phonemes, in what respects their alternation was predictable, and how this situation changed as Indo-European developed into Greek. The comprehensive nature of this study, its chronological sensitivity, and careful assessment of what is inherited and what is innovative, enables substantive conclusions to be drawn regarding the behaviour of semivowels at various stages in the history of Greek and in Indo-European itself.

Alongside considerable continuity, 20th-century diachronic linguistics has seen substantial shifts in outlook and procedure from the 19th-century paradigm. Our understanding of what is really new and what is recycled owes a great debt to E. F. K. Koerner's minutely researched interpretations of the work of the field's founders and key transitional figures. At the cusp of the 21st century, some of the best known scholars in the field explore how these methodological shifts have been and continue to be played out in historical Romance, Germanic and Indo-European linguistics, as well as in work outside these traditional areas. These 22 studies, honouring the founder of "Diachronica" and other publication ventures that have helped revitalize historical enquiry in recent decades, include examinations of Indo-European methodology and the reconstructions carried out by Bloomfield and Sapir; the search for relatives of Indo-European; comparative, structural and sociolinguistic analyses of the history of the Romance languages; regular vs. morpholexical approaches to OHG umlaut; and the synchrony and diachrony of gender affixes in Tsez.