Latin is one of the most important Indo-European languages in European history. Between the dissolution of Proto-Indo-European on the Pontic-Caspian steppe and the first attestation of written... Show moreLatin is one of the most important Indo-European languages in European history. Between the dissolution of Proto-Indo-European on the Pontic-Caspian steppe and the first attestation of written Latin on the Italian Peninsula, the ancestors of Latin-speakers had more than two millennia to migrate across Europe. The Europe that they entered was not empty however. It had been populated by farmers for three thousand years, and by hunter-gatherers for nearly ten thousand years before that. This dissertation investigates the lexemes in Latin that may have been borrowed from the languages that these populations spoke and combines the insights gained with lines of evidence from genetics and archaeology to hypothesize on the route that brought the ancestors of Latin-speakers into Italy. Show less
This work contains the first systematic investigation of the linguistic contacts between Tocharian A and B and Khotanese and Tumshuqese, four languages once spoken in the Tarim Basin, in today’s... Show moreThis work contains the first systematic investigation of the linguistic contacts between Tocharian A and B and Khotanese and Tumshuqese, four languages once spoken in the Tarim Basin, in today’s Xīnjiāng Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China. The main part of the book is devoted to determining a corpus of reliable Khotanese and Tumshuqese loanwords in Tocharian: new borrowing etymologies are proposed, and some old correspondences are rejected. The discussion of the individual loanwords often involves a fresh examination of the text passages where they occur, and, in some cases, it offers lexical insights regarding a variety of neighbouring languages (Chinese, Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, Gāndhārī and Old Uyghur). A detailed phonological, morphological, and semantic analysis of the corpus follows, with a view to determine the phonological correspondences, the relative chronology of the loanwords and possible historical scenarios of cultural exchange. One of the results of this investigation is that the influence of Khotanese and Tumshuqese on Tocharian was much more extensive than previously thought and it spanned over almost two millennia, from the early Iron Age until the extinction of the four languages at the end of the first millennium CE. Show less
Kroonen, G.; Jakob, A.; Palmér, A.I.; Sluis P. van; Wigman, A. 2022
Tocharian is the name given to two closely related Indo-European languages, Tocharian A and Tocharian B, known from manuscripts discovered in the Tarim basin. Despite its late attestation,... Show moreTocharian is the name given to two closely related Indo-European languages, Tocharian A and Tocharian B, known from manuscripts discovered in the Tarim basin. Despite its late attestation, Tocharian has proved to be archaic, particularly in some sections of the morphology. However, the exact relationship of Tocharian with the other Indo-European branches remains an unresolved issue. The problem is that a strong impact of language contact and internal drift has resulted in an intricate combination of archaisms and innovations that are often difficult to be disentangle.Examining the category of gender, this thesis contributes to the investigation of archaisms and innovations in Tocharian nominal morphology. It aims at providing a comprehensive treatment of the Tocharian gender system, describing how it historically derived from the Indo-European proto-language and why it typologically deviates from most of the other Indo-European languages. Show less
This dissertation consists of an investigation of the historical and sociolinguistic implications of some of the linguistic data that have been preserved from Merovingian Gaul. The data that was... Show moreThis dissertation consists of an investigation of the historical and sociolinguistic implications of some of the linguistic data that have been preserved from Merovingian Gaul. The data that was investigated here mainly consisted of Romance and Germanic lexis, which is the outcome of earlier lexical exchange (borrowing) between Germanic, Romance and Celtic. The central aim of this dissertation was to provide an overview of the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors that were involved in this lexical exchange, and thereby contribute to our knowledge of the Merovingian vernaculars in particular and Merovingian society in general. On a more general level, this study provides an overview of how linguistic data might complement the archaeological and historical frameworks, that are used to understand the transition from Roman to Merovingian Gaul. Special attention is paid to the Merovingian redactions of the Salic Law, both as a unique historical witness to everyday life in post-Roman Gaul as well as being a unique linguistic witness in its preservation of the Old Frankish Malberg glosses. Additionally, this dissertation provides an overview of Pre-French sound change and its relation to Merovingian Latin. Show less
The original Proto-Semitic triphthongs have developed in a variety of ways in the history of Arabic. Employing data from Old Arabic and the Quranic Consonantal Text, this paper examines the... Show moreThe original Proto-Semitic triphthongs have developed in a variety of ways in the history of Arabic. Employing data from Old Arabic and the Quranic Consonantal Text, this paper examines the developments of these triph- thongs in Classical Arabic and the language of the Quran. It describes the development in hollow and defective roots and shows that Quranic Ara- bic developed a new long vowels /ē/ and /ō/ in positions where Classical Arabic merges triphthongs with *ā. Show less
