Week 1
General 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 2
Italic (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 4
The 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 5
Proto-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 6
Comparative reconstruction – comparative method vs. internal reconstruction exemplified – morphological reconstruction – sound law in practice
Week 7
PIE 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 8
PIE 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 9
PIE 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 numerals
Week 10
PIE 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 11
PIE 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 – negation
Week 12
PIE 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).