Syllabus
Week 1General overview of the Indo-European family – Anatolian languages (decipherment, languages, cuneiform writing, historical timeline, attestations and corpora, relation to the IE family, cultural background, Greek-Anatolian relations in the 2nd millenium BCE) – Tocharian (discovery, writing system, relationw within IE family, cultural and historical setting) – Mycanean Greek (decipherment, historical timeline, Linear B and Minoan background).Week 2Italic (Latin and Sabellic, writing system(s), first attestations, question fo Lusitanian) – Celtic (continental Celtic, writing system(s), Celtic culture and migrations, insular Celtic, Old Irish) – Germanic (East, North, West, Gothic and Wufila, writing system(s), corpora) – Balto-Slavic (Old Church Slavonic, writing system(s), Balto-Slavic question and relations, Old Prussian, homeland question) – Balkan languages (Dacian, Thracian, Macedonian, Illyrian, Albanian, Messapic) – Armenian (its place in the IE family, writing system, relation to Greek and Phrygian) – Indo-Iranian (migrations, Vedic – language and era, Avestan, Old Persian, Behistun Inscription and the decipherment of cuneiform).Week 3(Comparative) linguitics since the antiquity – Mezopotamia (bilingual dictionaries) – Greece (Plato - Kratylos, etymology and method, relation to other languages) – Rome (Greek and Latin compared, grammarians and etymogists, Latin vs. other languages) – Christian Middle Ages (Isidore of Seville, the Bible bias, the rise of European vernaculars) – Renaissance and Reformation (New World, breaking the Bible Bias, return of Greek, first theories of IE language family, lexical comparison and speculation)Week 4The eve of IE linguistics (Enlightement period, William Jones, the age of Romanticism and the cultural environment, nations and national languages) – from Schlegel to Grimm (ex oriente lux, sound rule and sound law, Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp, Jakob Grimm, comparative grammar and comparative method, the first 6 branches) – from Schleicher to Saussure (reconstructing the proto-languge, Schleicher‘s fable, Neogrammarians, sound law as theory, centum-satem hypothesis, internal reconstruction and F. de Saussure, the beginning of structuralism, the last 4 branches, the impact of Anatolian).Week 5Proto-language and proto-culture – IE homeland(s) (geographical, cultural, linguistic, genetic and other aspects, the Caspic vs. Anatolian hypothesis) – the social organisation (the three castes, G.
Dumézil, the family, clan, tribe) – technology (agriculture, metalurgy, weaving, building construction, ceramics) – mythology and religion (cosmology, Dragon myths, IE pantheon, death and afterlife) – poetry (style, metrics, figures, themes, metaphors)Week 6Comparative reconstruction – comparative method vs. internal reconstruction exemplified – morphological reconstruction – sound law in practiceWeek 7PIE phonology I. – segmental phonology (distinctive features, frequency and functional load) – PIE stops (the three series and typology, velar phonemes, centum-satem hypothesis, Bartholomae‘s Law and Grassman‘s Law) – PIE fricatives (pie. *s and its development, arguments from writing) – laryngeals (de Saussure, speculations on their phonetics, their behavior, attestations, importance for the root structure and vocalism) – PIE sonorants (vocalic vs. consonantal, vocalisation)Week 8PIE phonology II. – PIE vocalism (number of phonemes, long vs. short, Szemerényi‘s Law, high vowel vs. semivowels, PIE *a) – ablaut (prehistory, function, system) – prosody (stress and accent)Week 9PIE morphology – word structure in PIE – derivation and composition (internal derivation, suffixation) – PIE noun and adjective: basic categories (case, gender, number, problem of the feminine, problem of the collective, the o-stem inflection) – main derivations (root-nouns, i-stems, u-stems, h2-stems, tor-agent nouns, TRo-instrument nouns, mn-stems, s-stems, o-stem and jo-stems) - compounds (basic principles, bahuvrihi, tat-purush, dvandva) – adjectives (gradation) – PIE numeralsWeek 10PIE verb – basic categories (person, number, voice, aspect, tense, mood) – endings of the active and the aspect/tense problem – the PIE perfect – athematic classes (root-verbs, reduplicated stems, n-stems, s-aorist), thematic conjugation (causative, ské-present, jé-presents) – present/imperfect vs. aorist – the optative and conjunctive – nominal formations (participles and infinitives)Week 11PIE pronouns and particles – Pronouns: categories compared to nominals (case, number, derivation) – personal pronouns (suppletion, problems with the dual) – demonstrative pronouns (*so/*to paradigm, deictic stems) – interrogative and indefinite pronoun – relative pronoun – pronominal adjectives – PIE particles: definition (relation to adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions) – morphology – function – negationWeek 12PIE syntax: basic word order and permutations (typology and history) – relative clauses – agreement – position of clitics – tmesis – gapping – absolute cases – comparative and superlative – PIE text and reconstruction obove word level (poetic devices, figures and metaphors, collocations).
Annotation
This lecture provides an introduction to the fiels of historic linguistics in general and Indo-European comparative linguistics in particular. It covers both the history of the discipline from antiquity, the evolution of thinking, aims, and methods, the interface with culture, archaeology, reliogious studies, history, philology and other disciplines, and a cursory presentation of the state of the art of the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language.
Though there are no prerequisites and all students are welcome, knowledge of some of the langages of antiquity helps.