Book
The Indo-European Languages
This book presents a comprehensive survey of the individual languages and language subgroups within the Indo-European language family.
With over four hundred languages and dialects and almost three billion native speakers, the Indo-European language family is the largest of the recognized language groups and includes most of the major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau and the Indian subcontinent. Written by an international team of experts, this comprehensive, single-volume tome presents in-depth discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistic features of the Indo-European languages. This unique resource is the ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Indo-European linguistics and languages, but also for more experienced researchers looking for an up-to-date survey of separate Indo-European branches. It is of interest to researchers and anyone with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology and language development.
THis is a short overview of the linguistic features of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, with a representative bibliography.
Indo-Iranian languages (another, outdated and quite misleading term is “Aryan”), which form a major branch of the Indo-European language family, are spoken by more than a billion of speakers occupying an immense territory from the Caucasus and southeastern Anatolia in the West to Northeast India and Bengal in the East and the Maldive Islands in the South. This grouping includes the Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Nūristānī (in earlier scholarship also called Kāfir), and Dardic branches.
This is a short overview of the linguistic features (phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon) of the Indo-Aryan group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, with a representative bibliography.
The Indo-Aryan languages (sometimes also referred to, misleadingly and not quite correctly, as Indic, with special focus on Sanskrit) represent the largest group of the Indo-European both by the total number of speakers of the present-day Indo-Aryan languages (approx. one and a half billion of the total three billion speakers of Indo-European languages) and by the number of languages (ca. 225 languages recognized, for instance, by Ethnologue, thus making up more than half of all Indo-European languages listed by this source). The largest Indo-Aryan languages include Hindi and Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Rajasthani and Gujarati. At present, Indo-Aryan languages are spoken, above all, on the Indian subcontinent, also referred to as South Asia.
One of the most important issues in modern historical linguistics is that of verifcation of hypotheses of deep level relationship between various linguistic families. Most noncontroversial theories of genetic relationship do not deal with time depths that surpass 5 or 6 thousand years ago, and the classic comparative method is often found insuffcient to reliably justify suggestions of macrofamily level relationship (such as “Nostratic”). It is therefore necessary to supplement the comparative method with additional techniques, particularly based on progress in the area of phylogenetic modeling, as well as with empirical typological evidence on language change that has been accumulated over several decades of intense research. In this short paper, we briefy describe the main goals and perspectives of the project upon which a team of our researchers is currently working at the Laboratory of Oriental Studies and comparative linguistics: (a) integration of signifcant data on the typology of phonetic and semantic change into the procedure of verifcation of language relationship; (b) improvement of the currently employed algorithms for statistical analysis of the basic lexicon; (c) inclusion of the results of our research in the computer software STARLING, originally designed by Sergei Starostin as a basic tool for historical linguistics purposes, and their approbation on linguistic databases for major linguistic families of Eurasia, Africa, and America that are currently being compiled for the related Web project “The Global Lexicostatistical Database”.
In The Precursors of Proto-Indo-European some of the world’s leading experts in historical linguistics shed new light on two hypotheses about the prehistory of the Indo-European language family, the so-called Indo-Anatolian and Indo-Uralic hypotheses. The Indo-Anatolian hypothesis states that the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family should be viewed as a sister language of ‘classical’ Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of all the other, non-Anatolian branches. The common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, including Anatolian, can then be called Proto-Indo-Anatolian. The Indo-Uralic hypothesis states that the closest genetic relative of Indo-European is the Uralic language family, and that both derive from a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-Uralic. The book unravels the history of these hypotheses and scrutinizes the evidence for and against them.
The paper discusses certain aspects of Indo-Uralic reconstruction, focusing on a comparison of our theoretical expectations from the comparison of Indo-European and Uralic basic lexicon with the actual results of lexicostatistical analysis.
Proceedings of the International Conference, St. Perersburg, 22–24 June, 2015
Over thirty specialists in Indo-European linguistics have contributed this elegant volume in honor of Prof. Sasha Lubotsky of Leiden University. Besides giving an excellent snapshot of the research currently being undertaken by his students and colleagues at that institution, Farnah contains contributions from well-known scholars across the world covering topics in Tocharian, Germanic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Anatolian linguistics, to name a few.
In this paper we discuss the results of an automated compari-son between two 50-item groups of the most generally stable elements on the so-called Swadesh wordlist as reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic. Two forms are counted as potentially related if their first two consonantal units, transcribed in simplified consonantal class notation (a rough variant of the Levenshtein distance method), match up with each other. Next to all previous attempts at such a task (Ringe 1998; Oswalt 1998; Kessler & Lehtonen 2006; Kessler 2007), our automated algorithm comes much closer to emu-lating the traditional procedure of cognate search as em-ployed in historical linguistics. “Swadesh slots” for protolan-guages are filled in strict accordance with such principles of reconstruction as topology (taking into consideration the structure of the genealogical tree), morphological transpar-ency, typology of semantic shifts, and areal distribution of particular items. Altogether we have counted 7 pairs where Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic share the same bi-consonantal skeleton (the exact same pairs are regarded as cognates in traditional hypotheses of Indo-Uralic relation-ship). To verify the probability of arriving at such a result by chance we have applied the permutation test, which yielded a positive result: the probability of 7 matched pairs is equal to 1.9% or 0.5%, depending on the constituency of the conso-nantal classes, which is lower than the standard 5% threshold of statistical significance or even lower than the strong 1% level. Standard methodology suggests that we reject the null hypothesis (accidental resemblance) and offer a more plau-sible explanation for the observed similarities. Since the known typology of language contacts does not speak in favor of explaining the observed Indo-Uralic matches as old lexical borrowings, the optimal explanation is seen in the hypothesis of an Indo-Uralic genetic relationship, with the 7 matching pairs in question representing archaic retentions, left over from the original Indo-Uralic protolanguage.
Review of the monograph offering an overview of the first decades of the history of Indo-European linguistics
In the paper, the classes of labile verbs (verbs which can be transitive or intransitive without any formal changes) are analyzed on the data of European and North Caucasian languages. The main conclusion is that there is a semantic difference between classes of labile verbs in the two language groups under analysis. In European languages, predicates with low semantic transitivity are labile (for instance, motion verbs and phasal verbs), while in Caucasian languages, lability is more characteristic of verbs with high semantic transitivity (verbs of destruction and similar verb classes).
In the paper two different models describing distribution and change of the linguistic information in some Indo-European communities are considered: nonlinear dynamic system model and the wave model described by system of the integral-differential equations. Within the frames of these models numerical research of distribution of the linguistic information has been carried in some Indo-European language community, including the initial stage of its formation. We take into consideration two main hypotheses: Anatolian and Kurgan. Anatolian hypothesis localizes IE ancestral home in western Anatolian. According to Kurgan hypothesis Proto-Indo-European people existed in Black sea steppes and southeast Europe approximately from V till III millennium BC. Domestication of horse and use of vehicles made culture carriers’ mobile, and it was the major stage in the development of Kurgan culture and has essentially expanded their influence. This fact has been put by us on the basis of the construction of our theoretical models. Results of some theoretical analysis and computer modeling are presented. The results of computer modeling show that among two main hypotheses of formation of the Proto-Indo-Europeans – Anatolian and Kurgan – the latter better matches the temporary estimates which were obtained by us. Finally, data on a hypothetical PIE alphabet – namely, the number of possible “characters/symbols” (“letters”) of PIE alphabet on the basis of our data were obtained. Based on the results, it was found that the range of possible values for alphabetic characters is limited to about values: 3 ÷ 38.
The paper is focused on the study of reaction of italian literature critics on the publication of the Boris Pasternak's novel "Doctor Jivago". The analysys of the book ""Doctor Jivago", Pasternak, 1958, Italy" (published in Russian language in "Reka vremen", 2012, in Moscow) is given. The papers of italian writers, critics and historians of literature, who reacted immediately upon the publication of the novel (A. Moravia, I. Calvino, F.Fortini, C. Cassola, C. Salinari ecc.) are studied and analised.
In the article the patterns of the realization of emotional utterances in dialogic and monologic speech are described. The author pays special attention to the characteristic features of the speech of a speaker feeling psychic tension and to the compositional-pragmatic peculiarities of dialogic and monologic text.