Gerd Carling – författare

Linguistic Archaeology provides students with an accessible introduction to the field of linguistic archaeology, both as theoretical framework and methodological toolkit, for understanding the conceptual foundations and practical considerations involved in reconstructing the prehistory of language.The book introduces the field’s expansion out of traditional approaches to focus more on the interplay of related disciplines and the reconstruction of human language beyond the written period. The opening chapter outlines key theories and charts their development from the nineteenth century through to today, drawing on work from computational historical linguistics, phylogenetics, and linguistic anthropology. Subsequent chapters build on theory to take a hands-on approach in mining empirical data in the process of reconstructing language prehistory, including references, links, and instructions to open access resources, and offering a step-by-step guide for employing the rich range of available methods in working with this data. Closing chapters situate theory and method in context against chronological and geographic perspectives and look ahead to future trajectories for continued progress in this emerging area of study.Offering a holistic entry point into linguistic archaeology, this innovative volume will be a helpful resource for students in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language evolution, and cultural geography.

Linguistic Archaeology provides students with an accessible introduction to the field of linguistic archaeology, both as theoretical framework and methodological toolkit, for understanding the conceptual foundations and practical considerations involved in reconstructing the prehistory of language.The book introduces the field’s expansion out of traditional approaches to focus more on the interplay of related disciplines and the reconstruction of human language beyond the written period. The opening chapter outlines key theories and charts their development from the nineteenth century through to today, drawing on work from computational historical linguistics, phylogenetics, and linguistic anthropology. Subsequent chapters build on theory to take a hands-on approach in mining empirical data in the process of reconstructing language prehistory, including references, links, and instructions to open access resources, and offering a step-by-step guide for employing the rich range of available methods in working with this data. Closing chapters situate theory and method in context against chronological and geographic perspectives and look ahead to future trajectories for continued progress in this emerging area of study.Offering a holistic entry point into linguistic archaeology, this innovative volume will be a helpful resource for students in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language evolution, and cultural geography.

This volume deals with the use of the local cases in Tocharian A and Tocharian B, Indo-European languages of the Tarim Basin, Eastern Central Asia, of the 6th to 9th centuries AD. Tocharian is basically inflectional-agglutinative, and this ten-dency is dominant in the case system. This study concentrates on the local cases expressing location and direction (i.e. oblique, allative, perlative, and locative) in case constructions and adpositional phrases expressing local and temporal relations. A theoretical discussion of the nature of the local cases and a possible evolution of their functions from Proto-Tocharian to Tocharian A and Tocharian B concludes this study.

Scandoromani: Remnants of a Mixed Language is the first, comprehensive, international description of the language of the Swedish and Norwegian Romano, also labeled resande/reisende. The language, an official minority language in Sweden and Norway, has a history in Scandinavia going back to the early 16th century. A mixed language of Romani and Scandinavian, it is spoken today by a vanishingly small population of mainly elderly people. This book is based on in-depth linguistic interviews with two native speakers of different families (one of whom is the co-author) as well as reviews of earlier sources on Scandoromani. The study reveals a number of interesting features of the language, as well as of mixed languages in general. In particular, the study gives support to the model of autonomy of mixed languages.