ISBN : 9780199609925
This book examines the operation of laws, rules, and principles in Indo-European, the language family which includes the Celtic, Germanic, Italic/Romance, and Baltic/Slavic subfamilies as well as the predominant languages of Greece, Iran, parts of Southern Asia, and ancient Anatolia. Laws and rules are crucial to Indo-European studies: they constrain the reconstructions and etymologies on which knowledge of the history and prehistory of Indo-European in particular and ancient languages more generally is based, and which allow processes of morphological change, semantic shift, and borrowing to be identified. But these laws and rules require constant reassessment in the light of new evidence, theory, and method. Through a series of case studies re-examining specific laws and rules in the Indo-European language family, this book explores the implications of new insights into language change andof increasing opportunities for attention to chronology and detail in the treatment of primary material. The languages and language families under consideration include Celtic, Germanic, Italic and Romance, Armenian, Greek, and Indo-Iranian languages as well as Proto-Indo-European. Laws and Rules in Indo-European brings together leading scholars from all over the world. It makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of the history of ancient languages and the reconstruction of their ancestors, as well as to research methods.
1. Introduction
PART I: LINGUISTICS 'LAWS' IN PRE-MODERN THOUGHT
2. Fern do frestol na. u. consaine: Perceptions of sound laws, sound change, and linguistic borrowing among the medieval Irish
PART II: RULES OF LANGUAGE CHANGE AND LINGUISTIC METHOLOGY
3. Cladistic Principles and Linguistic Reality: The case of West Germanic
4. Older Runic Evidence for Northwest Germanic a-umlaut of u (and 'the converse of Polivanov's Law')
5. A Law Unto Themselves? An Acoustic Phonetic Study of 'Tonal' Consonants in British Panjabi
6. Kurylowicz's First 'Law of Analogy' and the Development of Passive periphrases in Latin
7. Phonetic Laws, Relative and Absolute Chronology, Language Diffusion and the Drift: The loss of sibilants in the Greek dialects of the first millennium BC
PART III: SEGMENTAL SOUND LAWS: NEW PROPOSALS AND REASSESSMENTS
8. A Rule of Deaspiration in Ancient Greek
9. Regular Sound Change and Word-initial in Armenian
10. Schrijver's Rules for British and Proto-Celtic *-o- and *-u- Before a Vowel
PART IV: ORIGINS AND EVOLUTIONS
11. Origins of the Greek Law of Limitation
12. Re-examining Lindeman's Law
13. Exon's Law and the latin Syncopes
PART V: SYSTEMIC CONSEQUENCES
14. Brugmann's Law: The problem of Indo-Iranian thematic nouns and adjectives
15. Kiparsky's Rule, Thematic Nasal Presents and Athematic verba vocalia in Greek
PART VI: SYNCHRONIC LAWS AND RULES IN SYNTAX AND SOCIOLINGUISTICS
16. Praetor urbanus - urbanus praetor: Some aspects of attributive adjective placement in Latin
17. The Rules of Politeness and Latin Request Formulae
References
General Index
Index of Words
