Thomas Olander

Modern languages like English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi as well as ancient languages like Greek, Latin and Sanskrit all belong to the Indo-European language family, which means that they all descend from a common ancestor. But how, more precisely, are the Indo-European languages related to each other? This book brings together pioneering research from a team of international scholars to address this fundamental question. It provides an introduction to linguistic subgrouping as well as offering comprehensive, systematic and up-to-date analyses of the ten main branches of the Indo-European language family: Anatolian, Tocharian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic. By highlighting that these branches are saliently different from each other, yet at the same time display striking similarities, the book demonstrates the early diversification of the Indo-European language family, spoken today by half the world's population. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

A Phylogenetic Perspective

The Indo-European Language Family

Why does the accent jump back and forth in Russian words like golová 'head', acc. gólovu, gen. golový, dat. golové etc.? How come we find similar alternations in other Slavic languages and in a Baltic language like Lithuanian? The quest for the origin of the so-called "mobile accent paradigms" of Baltic and Slavic leads the reader through other Indo-European language branches such as Indo-Iranian, Greek and Germanic, all of which are relevant to the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European accentuation system. After the examination of the evidence for the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European accentuation system, focus is moved to the Baltic and Slavic accentuation systems and their relationship to each other and to Proto-Indo-European. A comprehensive history of research and numerous bibliographical references to earlier pieces of scholarship throughout the book make it a useful tool for anybody who is interested in Balto-Slavic and Indo-European accentology. Written in a simple style and constantly aiming at presenting old and new opinions on the various problems, the volume may serve as an introduction to this complicated field.

Balto-Slavic Accentual Mobility

In this volume, Thomas Olander offers a historical analysis of the inflectional endings of Proto-Slavic, comparing them with the corresponding endings in related languages and reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European point of departure.

A Comparative Handbook

Proto-Slavic Inflectional Morphology

Paul Widmer

Götz Keydana 

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 analyze 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.

Indo-European Accent and Ablaut

Michaël Peyrot

Georges-Jean Pinault

Jens Elmegård Rasmussen

Tocharian and Indo-European Studies (TIES) publishes central topics on the two closely related languages Tocharian A and B, attested in Central Asian Buddhist manuscripts dating from the second half of the first millennium AD. It focuses on philological and linguistic aspects of Tocharian, and its relation with the other Indo-European languages

Tocharian and Indo-European Studies vol.14

With text in English & German, this book contains papers from the XVI International Conference on Historical Linguistics held at the University of Copenhagen.

Methods, Results, and Problems : Section Papers from the XVI International Conference on Historical Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, 11th-15th August, 2003

Internal Reconstruction in Indo-European

The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. The series considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language.

Kristian Kristiansen

Birgit Anette Olsen

Recent developments in aDNA has reshaped our understanding of later European prehistory, and at the same time also opened up for more fruitful collaborations between archaeologists and historical linguists. Two revolutionary genetic studies, published independently in Nature, 2015, showed that prehistoric Europe underwent two successive waves of migration, one from Anatolia consistent with the introduction of agriculture, and a later influx from the Pontic-Caspian steppes which without any reasonable doubt pinpoints the archaeological Yamnaya complex as the cradle of (Core-)Indo-European languages. Now, for the first time, when the preliminaries are clear, it is possible for the fields of genetics, archaeology and historical linguistics to cooperate in a constructive fashion to refine our knowledge of the Indo-European homeland, migrations, society and language. For the historical-comparative linguists, this opens up a wealth of exciting perspectives and new working fields in the intersections between linguistics and neighbouring disciplines, for the archaeologists and geneticists, on the other hand, the linguistic contributions help to endow the material findings with a voice from the past. The present selection of papers illustrate the importance of an open interdisciplinary discussion which will gradually help us in our quest of Tracing the Indo-Europeans.

New evidence from archaeology and historical linguistics

Tracing the Indo-Europeans

Tocharian and Indo-European Studies is the central publication for the study of two closely related languages, Tocharian A and Tocharian B. Found in many Buddhist manuscripts from central Asia, Tocharian dates back to the second half of the first millennium of the Common Era, though it was not discovered until the twentieth century. Focusing on both philological and linguistic aspects of this language, Tocharian and Indo-European Studies also looks at it in relationship to other Indo-European languages. This issue addresses topics such as the function and origin of the present suffix "-sk," verbal endings, the words for "fear" and "perfume," secular documents, and Tocharian glosses in Sanskrit manuscripts. Birgit Anette Olsen is a researcher and instructor at the University of Copenhagen and author of Derivation and Composition and The Noun in Biblical Armenian. Michaël Peyrot is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna. Georges-Jean Pinault is professor at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. Thomas Olander is a researcher and instructor at the University of Copenhagen.

Thomas Olander

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