Brill's Studies in Indo-European Languages & Linguistics – serie

The Iguvine Tables (Tabulae Iguvinae) are among the most invaluable documents of Italic linguistics and religion. Seven bronze tablets discovered in 1444 in the Umbrian town of Gubbio (ancient Iguvium), they record the rites and sacral laws of a priestly brotherhood, the Fratres Atiedii, with a degree of detail unparalleled elsewhere in ancient Italy. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines philological and linguistic, as well as ritual analysis, Michael Weiss not only addresses the many interpretive cruces that have puzzled scholars for a century and a half, but also constructs a coherent theory of the entire ritual performance described on Tables III and IV. In addition, Weiss sheds light on many questions of Roman ritual practice and places the Iguvine Tables in their broader Italic and Indo-European contexts.

Luvian is the language of Anatolian hieroglyphic inscriptions and a close relative of Hittite. This book explores the Luvian ethnic history through sociolinguistic methods, with an emphasis on the interpretation of contacts between Luvian and its linguistic neighbors, such as Hittite, Hurrian, and Greek. It is concluded that Luvian was originally spoken in the central part of Anatolia. Subsequent Luvian migrations were connected with the expansion of the Hittite state, where Hittite was the socially dominant language, but the Luvian speakers were more numerous. The unstable balance between the Hittite and the Luvian speakers continued to shift in favor of the second group, to the point that the Hittite elites were fully bilingual in Luvian.

This book takes a fresh look at the relationship between aspect, tense and mood in Early Vedic, the language of the Rigveda. Although numerous studies have examined the functional range of individual verbal categories in this language, this work is the first attempt to approach this problem from an overall, systemic perspective. With insights from formal semantics and linguistic typology, the author demonstrates that aspect represents a grammatically relevant semantic dimension on a par with tense in the Early Vedic verbal system, thereby indicating that the language has preserved an aspectual opposition similar to the one found in Homeric Greek. Apart from these general findings, the book provides a theoretical framework designed for exploring inflectional semantics in dead languages.

The Baltic languages (Lithuanian, Latvian, Old Prussian) are well known for their archaic structure, but their contribution to Indo-European linguistics has hitherto often been underestimated. The aim of this book is to give a thorough survey of some of the major issues of Baltic linguistics. It consists of five chapters, devoted, respectively, to the problems of Baltic dialectology, to the development of the Baltic accentual system, to the fate of the neuter gender in Baltic, to the reconstruction of the Baltic verbal system and, finally, to the syntax of clitic forms in Baltic.

This book presents a synchronic and diachronic study of all verbal classes and categories of the Tocharian branch of Indo-European. It lists all attested Tocharian verbal forms, together with semantic and etymological information. The material has been subject to careful philological evaluation and incorporates unedited or unpublished texts of the Berlin, London, and Paris collections. In addition, this study consistently takes into account the linguistic variation within the Tocharian B language and the relative chronology of texts. Moreover, Tocharian offers crucial evidence for the reconstruction of the PIE verbal system, and is also of interest to the general linguist for the interaction of voice and valency.

Past research on the Sabellian languages has been devoted mainly to the phonetic and morphological features of these languages as elements for the reconstruction of the prehistoric stages of Latin. The present book aims at analysing the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic features of a subset of grammatical terms, the demonstratives. It contains a thorough description of their synchronic behaviour, which permits both a comparison to the Latin data with new hypotheses on the epigraphic genres in Republican Italy and a reconstruction of the Italic origins of these terms based on typological principles. Neither the grammar of Sabellian nor the pragmatic scope of the Sabellian inscriptions should be considered a priori identical to their Latin comparanda.

As one of the most central categories of the Tocharian verb, the subjunctive is of utmost importance for the reconstruction of the verbal system, the most rewarding domain of Tocharian historical grammar. Michaël Peyrot provides a thorough analysis of the formation of the subjunctive in both Tocharian languages, and establishes its meaning on the basis of a systematic investigation of a wealth of published and unpublished texts. A careful reconstruction of the Proto-Tocharian stage provides a solid base for the comparison with Indo-European and the derivation of the Tocharian subjunctive from the proto-language. With its focus on the wide variety of intricate morphological patterns, The Tocharian Subjunctive is at the same time a study of the whole Tocharian verbal system.

This volume contains thirteen contributions on the origin of the feminine gender and its relation to the collective in the Indo-European parent language. The Indo-European daughter languages have got mostly a three-gender system, however the early attested Anatolian languages owned only two genders. In this respect, it is debatable whether the feminine gender is primary or arose secondarily from another morphological category. Due to special morphological and morphosyntactic phenomena it is also questionable whether the neuter plural of the individual languages continues an inflectional category or it was rather grammaticalized from an original word formation category collective. The authors suggest different approaches on the question of the relationship between feminine and collective.

Proto-Slavic, the reconstructed ancestor of the Slavic languages, presents a rich inflectional system inherited from Proto-Indo-European. In this handbook all the inflectional endings of Proto-Slavic are traced back to Proto-Indo-European through a systematic comparison with the corresponding forms in related languages.Applying a redefinition of Proto-Slavic based on prehistoric loanword relations with neighbouring non-Slavic languages, Thomas Olander provides a new look at the Proto-Slavic inflectional system. The systematic, coherent and exhaustive approach laid out in the handbook paves the way for new solutions to long-standing problems of Slavic historical grammar.

In Language and Meter, Dieter Gunkel and Olav Hackstein unite fifteen linguistic studies on a variety of poetic traditions, including the Homeric epics, the hieratic hymns of the Ṛgveda, the Gathas of the Avesta, early Latin and the Sabellic compositions, Germanic alliterative verse, Insular Celtic court poetry, and Tocharian metrical texts. The studies treat a broad range of topics, including the prehistory of the hexameter, the nature of Homeric formulae, the structure of Vedic verse, rhythm in the Gathas, and the relationship between Germanic and Celtic poetic traditions. The volume contributes to our understanding of the relationship between language and poetic form, and how they change over time.

Dispersals and diversification offers linguistic and archaeological perspectives on the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of the Indo-European language family.Two chapters discuss the early phases of the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European from an archaeological perspective, integrating and interpreting the new evidence from ancient DNA. Six chapters analyse the intricate relationship between the Anatolian branch of Indo-European, probably the first one to separate, and the remaining branches. Three chapters are concerned with the most important unsolved problems of Indo-European subgrouping, namely the status of the postulated Italo-Celtic and Graeco-Armenian subgroups. Two chapters discuss methodological problems with linguistic subgrouping and with the attempt to correlate linguistics and archaeology.Contributors are David W. Anthony, Rasmus Bjørn, José L. García Ramón, Riccardo Ginevra, Adam Hyllested, James A. Johnson, Kristian Kristiansen, H. Craig Melchert, Matthew Scarborough, Peter Schrijver, Matilde Serangeli, Zsolt Simon, Rasmus Thorsø, Michael Weiss.

The Aeolic dialects of Ancient Greek (Lesbian, Thessalian, and Boeotian) are characterised by a small bundle of commonly shared innovations, yet at the same time they exhibit remarkable linguistic diversity. While traditionally classified together in modern scholarship since the nineteenth century, in recent decades doubt has been cast on whether they form a coherent dialectal subgroup of Ancient Greek. In this monograph Matthew Scarborough outlines the history of problem of Aeolic classification from antiquity to the present day, collects and analyses the primary evidence for the linguistic innovations that unite and divide the group, and contributes an innovative new statistical methodology for evaluating highly contested genetic subgroupings in dialectology, ultimately arguing in support of the traditional classification.

Der vorliegende Band liefert eine eingehende Untersuchung umbrischer und hethitischer Rituale und ritualbezogener Texte und hebt sich besonders durch die interdisziplinäre Perspektive und innovative Methodik von bisherigen Arbeiten in diesem Themenfeld ab. Durch die Untersuchung der jeweiligen funktionalen und kommunikativen Kontexte demonstriert Theresa Roth, wie aktuelle Fragestellungen der linguistischen Pragmatik und besonders der Fachsprachenforschung erfolgreich auf historische Sprachstufen angewandt werden können. Damit leistet sie einen maßgeblichen Beitrag zu der Frage, wie ritualbezogene Textsorten durch textstrukturelle und kommunikative Parameter geprägt und differenziert werden.This monograph contributes substantially to the identification and description of the communicative and textual parameters which characterize ritual language as a language for special purposes. The interdisciplinary approach used by the author is methodologically innovative within the field of historical linguistics. By examining the functional and communicative contexts of ritual and religious texts from Hittite and Umbrian, Theresa Roth demonstrates how current questions of pragmatics and research on languages for special purposes can be successfully transferred to ancient languages.

Gothic is unique among Germanic languages in regards to the ways it expresses non-agentive actions. It both retains a formal passive and has two periphrastic passives. In addition it presents an intransitive verb class with generally inchoative meaning. R. Moses Katz examines the semantics of these categories and shows how they provide a robust non-agentive paradigm in Gothic, including a functional, result-state perfect in the passive. In two parts, he examines first the inchoative verb and then the periphrastic passive. He proposes that the development of both types is underpinned by a single argument structure based on the resultative, a coordinated event type that links a transition with a resulting state.

This book presents the first systematic linguistic study of Zenodotus’ variant readings, showing that he used a version of Homer older than the one used by Aristarchus a century later. Several clues point to the fact that Zenodotus’ version belongs to a tradition that was already distinct from that which eventually yielded the vulgate (that is, the Homer we know). In particular, his version largely pre-dates the Sophists’ reflections on language, rhetorics and style, and the grammatical theories of Alexandrian scholars.The finding presented in this book should encourage not only historical linguists, but also philologists and classicists to revise the communis opinio and attentively consider Zenodotus’ readings in their research.

The development of the prosodic system from Indo-European to Balto-Slavic is dominated by two major innovations: the rise of mobility and the rise of acuteness. This book provides a new account of the latter. It stands out from previous works for being informed by recent advances in phonological typology and tonogenesis and, especially, for its comprehensiveness. All matters related to the rise of acuteness are treated in detail. As a result, the book includes new insights on several issues of Balto-Slavic historical phonology and morphology as well.

Wo kommt B-tocharisch ātstse ‚dicht‘ oder A-tocharisch märtār ‚kurz‘ her? Hier finden Sie die Antwort auf diese und viele andere strittige Fragen zur sprachlichen Vorgeschichte des Tocharischen. Dieses Buch bietet eine äußerst ausführliche etymologische Analyse von 210 synchron undurchsichtigen tocharischen Adjektiven und liefert viele neue und originelle Erklärungen für mehrere bisher obskure tocharische Wörter. Die vorgeschlagenen Etymologien geben uns neue Einblicke in die tocharische Phonologie und Morphologie und ermöglichen uns, die phylogenetische Beziehung zwischen dem Tocharischen und den anderen indogermanischen Sprachzweigen besser zu verstehen. Zugleich leistet dieses Buch einen wichtigen Beitrag zu einer verbesserten Rekonstruktion des Urindogermanischen.Where does Tocharian B ātstse ‘dense’ or Tocharian A märtār ‘short’ come from? Here, you will find the answer to this question and to many other debated issues concerning the linguistic prehistory of Tocharian. This book offers an extremely detailed etymological analysis of 210 synchronically opaque Tocharian adjectives and provides plenty of novel and original explanations for several so far obscure Tocharian words. The proposed etymologies give us new insights into Tocharian phonology and morphology and help us better understand the phylogenetic relationship between Tocharian and the other Indo-European branches. At the same time, this book makes a significant contribution to an improved and up-to-date reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European.Klik hier für Band IIClick here for Volume II