LSA 208: Indo-European language contact and prehistory

Peter Schrijver | session 2 | CANCELLED

After all the attention that has been paid over the last decades to the ways in which modern language contact shapes linguistic change, the time is now ripe to probe into distant eras in order to find out whether language contact can be traced even if we do not possess full information about linguistic settings. This is what the teacher of this course has been doing over the last few years. During the course, a number of case histories will be explored in order to illustrate research methods and their results. These will take us from the origins of English and German via the rise of the Germanic and Celtic branches of Indo-European to the pre-Indo-European linguistic map of Europe. Since language contact is contact between people, this approach enables us to formulate linguistically based views on European prehistory, which are bound to revive discussions between historical linguists and archaeologists.

Reading: Selected materials available online.

Areas of linguistics: Areal and historical linguistics; Languages of Eurasia