This volume presents the key examples of morphological correspondences between Indo-European and Semitic languages, afforded by nouns, verbal roots, pronouns, prepositions, and numerals. Its focus is on shared morphology embodied in the cognate vocabulary. The facts that are brought out in this volume do not fit comfortably within either the Indo-Europeanists’ or the Semitists’ conception of the prehistoric development of their languages. Nonetheless they are so fundamental that many would take them for evidence of a single original source, ‘Proto-Nostratic’. In this book, however, it is considered unsettled whether proto-IE and proto-Semitic had a common forerunner. But the IE-Semitic combinations testify at least to prehistoric language communities in truly intimate contact.

This is a sequel to the author's Semitic and Indo-European: The Principal Etymologies (1995). That volume provided the key examples of morphological correspondences between the Semitic and the Indo-European languages. In this sequel, the author analyzes correspondences of structure, either within a certain group of languages or belonging to a distantly related group, by looking at inflectional morphology, case, grammar, and phonology. Thus are uncovered the prehistoric means of oral communication, linking the forerunners of ancient societies in Asia, Africa, and Europe, as they talked about livestock or revealed some inner sentiment.

As the title indicates, this unique resource is a manual on comparative linguistics, with the examples taken exclusively from Semitic languages. It is an innovative volume that recalls the earlier tradition of textbooks of comparative philology, which, however, exclusively treated Indo-European languages. It is suited for students with at least a year of a Semitic language. By far the largest component of the book are the nine wordlists that provide the data to be manipulated by the student. Says reviewer Peter Daniels, the wordlists "constitute a unique resource for all of comparative linguistics--a considerable quantity of uniform data from a host of related languages. They would be useful for any class in comparative linguistics, not just for those interested specifically in Semitic." Scattered throughout the text are 25 exercises based on the wordlists that provide a good introduction to the methods of comparativists. Also included are paradigms of the phonological systems of ten Semitic languages as well as Coptic and a form of Berber. A bibliography that guides the student into further reading in Semitic linguistics completes the volume.

This volume presents the key examples of morphological correspondences between Indo-European and Semitic languages, afforded by nouns, verbal roots, pronouns, prepositions, and numerals. Its focus is on shared morphology embodied in the cognate vocabulary. The facts that are brought out in this volume do not fit comfortably within either the Indo-Europeanists' or the Semitists' conception of the prehistoric development of their languages. Nonetheless they are so fundamental that many would take them for evidence of a single original source, 'Proto-Nostratic'. In this book, however, it is considered unsettled whether proto-IE and proto-Semitic had a common forerunner. But the IE-Semitic combinations testify at least to prehistoric language communities in truly intimate contact.

Germania Semitica explores prehistoric language contact in general, and attempts to identify the languages involved in shaping Germanic in particular. The book deals with a topic outside the scope of other disciplines concerned with prehistory, such as archaeology and genetics, drawing its conclusions from the linguistic evidence alone, relying on language typology and areal probability. The data for reconstruction comes from Germanic syntax, phonology, etymology, religious loan names, and the writing system, more precisely from word order, syntactic constructions, word formation, irregularities in phonological form, lexical peculiarities, and the structure and rules of the Germanic runic alphabet. It is demonstrated that common descent is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for reconstruction. Instead, lexical and structural parallels between Germanic and Semitic languages are explored and interpreted in the framework of modern language contact theory.

The authors introduce Proto-Indo-European describing its construction and revealing the people who spoke it between 5,500 and 8,000 years ago. Using archaeological evidence and natural history they reconstruct the lives, passions, culture, society and mythology of the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

This book challenges media-celebrated evolutionary studies linking Indo-European languages to Neolithic Anatolia, instead defending traditional practices in historical linguistics.

This monograph presents a general picture of the evolution of IE verbal systems within a coherent cognitive framework. The work encompasses all the language families of the IE phylum, from prehistory to present day languages. Inspired by the ideas of Roman Jakobson and Gustave Guillaume the authors relate tense and aspect to underlying cognitive processes, and show that verbal systems have a staged development of time representations (chronogenesis). They view linguistic change as systemic and trace the evolution of the earliest tense systems by (a) aspectual split and (b) aspectual merger from the original aspectual contrasts of PIE, the evidence for such systemic change showing clearly in the paradigmatic morphology of the daughter languages. The nineteen chapters cover first the ancient documentation, then those families whose historical data are from a more recent date. The last chapters deal with the systemic evolution of languages that are descended from ancient forbears such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and are completed by a chapter on the practical and theoretical conclusions of the work.