In Hot Pursuit of Language in Prehistory

In Hot Pursuit of Language in Prehistory
Author: John D. Bengtson
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2008
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027232520

Compiled in honor and celebration of veteran anthropologist Harold C. Fleming, this book contains 23 articles by anthropologists (in the general sense) from the four main disciplines of prehistory: archaeology, biogenetics, paleoanthropology, and genetic (historical) linguistics. Because of Professor Fleming's major focus on language — he founded the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory and the journal Mother Tongue — the content of the book is heavily tilted toward the study of human language, its origins, historical development, and taxonomy. Because of Fleming's extensive field experience in Africa some of the articles deal with African topics. This volume is intended to exemplify the principle, in the words of Fleming himself, that each of the four disciplines is enriched when it combines with any one of the other four. The authors are representative of the cutting edge of their respective fields, and this book is unusual in including contributions from a wide range of anthropological fields rather than concentrating in any one of them.

The Prehistory of Languages

The Prehistory of Languages
Author: Mary R. Haas
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2018-12-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110881640

No detailed description available for "The Prehistory of Languages".

Language Contacts in Prehistory

Language Contacts in Prehistory
Author: Henning Andersen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2003
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781588113795

Every language includes layers of lexical and grammatical elements that entered it at different times in the more or less distant past. Hence, for periods preceding our earliest historical documentation, linguistic stratigraphy the systematic study of such layers may yield information about the prehistory of a given tradition of speaking in a variety of ways. For instance, irregular phonological reflexes may be evidence of the convergence of diverse dialects in the formation of a language, and layers of material from different source languages may form a record of changing cultural contacts in the past. In this volume are discussed past problems and current advances in the stratigraphy of Indo-European, African, Southeast Asian, Australian, Oceanic, Japanese, and Meso-American languages.

Millennia of Language Change

Millennia of Language Change
Author: Peter Trudgill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2020-04-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108477399

This collection brings together Peter Trudgill's essays on the sociolinguistic aspects of historical linguistics for the first time.

Language in Prehistory

Language in Prehistory
Author: Alan Barnard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2016-01-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1316467732

For ninety per cent of our history, humans have lived as 'hunters and gatherers', and for most of this time, as talking individuals. No direct evidence for the origin and evolution of language exists; we do not even know if early humans had language, either spoken or signed. Taking an anthropological perspective, Alan Barnard acknowledges this difficulty and argues that we can nevertheless infer a great deal about our linguistic past from what is around us in the present. Hunter-gatherers still inhabit much of the world, and in sufficient number to enable us to study the ways in which they speak, the many languages they use, and what they use them for. Barnard investigates the lives of hunter-gatherers by understanding them in their own terms, to create a book which will be welcomed by all those interested in the evolution of language.

The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics
Author: Claire Bowern
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1072
Release: 2015-03-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317743237

The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics provides a survey of the field covering the methods which underpin current work; models of language change; and the importance of historical linguistics for other subfields of linguistics and other disciplines. Divided into five sections, the volume encompass a wide range of approaches and addresses issues in the following areas: historical perspectives methods and models language change interfaces regional summaries Each of the thirty-two chapters is written by a specialist in the field and provides: a introduction to the subject; an analysis of the relationship between the diachronic and synchronic study of the topic; an overview of the main current and critical trends; and examples from primary data. The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in this area. Chapter 28 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315794013.ch28

Archaeology and Language

Archaeology and Language
Author: Colin Renfrew
Publisher: CUP Archive
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1990-01-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521386753

In this book Colin Renfrew directs remarkable new light on the links between archaeology and language, looking specifically at the puzzling similarities that are apparent across the Indo-European family of ancient languages, from Anatolia and Ancient Persia, across Europe and the Indian subcontinent, to regions as remote as Sinkiang in China. Professor Renfrew initiates an original synthesis between modern historical linguistics and the new archaeology of cultural process, boldly proclaiming that it is time to reconsider questions of language origins and what they imply about ethnic affiliation--issues seriously discredited by the racial theorists of the 1920s and 1930s and, as a result, largely neglected since. Challenging many familiar beliefs, he comes to a new and persuasive conclusion: that primitive forms of the Indo-European language were spoken across Europe some thousands of years earlier than has previously been assumed.

Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages

Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages
Author: Peter Forster
Publisher: McDonald Institute Monographs
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2006
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

Evolutionary ('phylogenetic') trees were first used to infer lost histories nearly two centuries ago by manuscript scholars reconstructing original texts. Today, computer methods are enabling phylogenetic trees to transform genetics, historical linguistics and even the archaeological study of artefact shapes and styles. But which phylogenetic methods are best suited to retracing the evolution of languages? And which types of language data are most informative about deep prehistory? In this book, leading specialists engage with these key questions. Essential reading for linguists, geneticists and archaeologists, these studies demonstrate how phylogenetic tools are illuminating previously intractable questions about language prehistory. This innovative volume arose from a conference of linguists, geneticists and archaeologists held at Cambridge in 2004.

The Ancient Languages of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Aksum

The Ancient Languages of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Aksum
Author: Roger D. Woodard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2008-04-10
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0521684978

A convenient, portable paperback derived from the acclaimed Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages.

A Prehistory of Western North America

A Prehistory of Western North America
Author: David Leedom Shaul
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2014-06-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0826354815

This book offers a new approach to the use of linguistic data to reconstruct prehistory. The author shows how a well-studied language family—in this case Uto-Aztecan—can be used as an instrument for reconstructing prehistory. The main focus of Shaul’s work is the mapping of Uto-Aztecan. By presenting various models of Uto-Aztecan prehistory, by assessing multiple models simultaneously, and by guiding readers through areas where the evidence is not so clear, Shaul helps nonspecialists develop the tools needed for evaluating various historical linguistics models themselves. He evaluates both archaeological and genetic evidence as well, placing it carefully alongside the linguistic evidence he knows best. Shaul’s thorough treatment provides many new avenues for future research on the historical anthropology of western North America.