Frederik Kortlandt – författare

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.

The red thread which runs through this book is a quest for relative chronology of linguistic developments. The probability of a reconstruction can be judged against the background of the transitions which it implies for the linguistic system as a whole. The reconstructions are always bottom-up, never top-down. It follows that the chapters on Germanic can be read without reference to the Indo-European background and that the Indo-Uralic part of the book can be left out of consideration if one does not want to look beyond Proto-Indo-European. The initial chapters of the book offer an introduction to the background and methodology of the reconstructions with a discussion of the spread of the Indo-Europeans, the role of general linguistics in linguistic reconstruction, the nature of mixed languages, the origin of the Goths, the relations between Indo-European, Uralic and Caucasian languages, and the structure and development of Proto-Indo-European. The following chapters deal with the phonology and morphosyntax of Indo-European, Greek, Indo-Iranian and Tocharian. These are followed by a discussion of Germanic phonology, verb classes, verbal and nominal inflexion, and specific issues in English, German and Scandinavian languages. After a short treatment of Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic and Italo-Celtic topics, the volume is concluded with a discussion of Anatolian and Indo-Uralic phonology and morphosyntax. The book is of interest to students of Germanic, Indo-European and historical linguistics.