Jens Elmegard Rasmussen – författare

Text in English & German. The present volume contains selected papers from a symposium on Internal Reconstruction in Indo- European: Methods, Results and Problems, which formed a subsection of the 16th International Conference on Historical Linguistics held at the University of Copenhagen. This is one of the first international conferences ever to deal with internal reconstruction. Internal reconstruction is what the historical linguist resorts to when the possibilities of more traditional comparative reconstruction have been exhausted. This is certainly the case at the level of the protolanguage: when Proto-Indo-European has been reconstructed on the basis of a painstaking comparative analysis of the entire data field drawing on the full range of extant lE languages, there are quite often questions still left unanswered. Comparable methods can be applied to later stages of the language where the immediate prehistory is not accessible or a corroboration is wanted. Today, internal reconstruction is routinely applied at all levels of historical linguistic analysis as one of the tools that open up the linguistic prehistory. The papers published illustrate the full range of the phenomenon of internal reconstruction.

One of the most detailed and comprehensive studies of Indo-European phonology, this book brings together leading linguists working in Indo-European studies to examine both the broadest definitions of the group -- from minute phonetics to abstract levels of phonemics centring on all varieties of Indo-European -- and individual branches, with contributions on Celtic, Anatolian, Germanic, Indo-Iranian, Italic, Armenian, and even Euphratic.

Ablaut, the grammatically conditioned vowel alternations found in e.g. English sing vs. sang vs. sung, is one of the most characteristic features of the Indo-European languages. The different ablaut grades seem to be related to the position of the accent in Proto-Indo-European. A good understanding of the relationship between accent and ablaut in Proto-Indo-European requires thorough analyses of the role played by the two phenomena in the Indo-European daughter languages. The aim of the volume is to present the state of the art in current work on accent and ablaut in Proto-Indo-European and its daughter languages. The contributors analyse the interplay between accent and ablaut with attention both to theoretical aspects and to the specific linguistic material. Presenting up-to-date overviews of the models developed by various schools of thought, the contributors discuss a wide array of empirical as well as methodological problems, thus opening up vistas for further research.