Bianconi, Michele, Marta Capano, Domenica Romagno & Francesco Rovai (eds.). 2022. Ancient Indo-European Languages between Linguistics and Philology: Contact, Variation, and Reconstruction (Brill’s Studies in Historical Linguistics, 18). Leiden: Brill.
Studying the Indo-European languages means having a privileged viewpoint on diachronic language change, because of their relative wealth of documentation, which spans over more than three millennia with almost no interruption, and their cultural position that they have enjoyed in human history.
The chapters in this volume investigate case-studies in several ancient Indo-European languages (Ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite, Luwian, Sanskrit, Avestan, Old Persian, Armenian, Albanian) through the lenses of contact, variation, and reconstruction, in an interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary way. This reveals at the same time the multiplicity and the unity of our discipline(s), both by showing what kind of results the adoption of modern theories on “old” material can yield, and by underlining the centrality and complexity of the text in any research related to ancient languages.
Table of contents:
- Foreword (Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald)
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction (Michele Bianconi and Marta Capano)
- Divine Witnesses in Greece and Anatolia: Iliad 3.276–280 between Contact, Variation, and Reconstruction (Michele Bianconi)
- Achaemenid Elamite and Old Persian Indefinites: A Comparative View( Juan E. Briceño Villalobos)
- Phenomena of Spirantization and Language Contact in Greek Sicilian Inscriptions. The case of τριαιντα (Marta Capano)
- Egyptian Greek: A Contact Variety (Sonja Dahlgren)
- Substrate Matters (Franco Fanciullo)
- Natural Language Use and Bilingual Interference: Verbal Complementation Patterns in Post-Classical Greek (Victoria Fendel)
- Where Does Dionysus Ὕης Come From? (Laura Massetti)
- Alignment Change and Changing Alignments: Armenian Syntax and the First ‘Death’ of Parthian (Robin Meyer)
- Rewriting the Law: Diachronic Variation and Register in Greek and Hittite Legal Language (Katharine Shields)
- Lexical Variation in Young Avestan: The Problem of the ‘Ahuric’ and ‘Daevic’ Vocabularies Revisited (Elizabeth Tucker)
- Greek ἄγυρις ‘Gathering’ between Dialectology and Indo-European Reconstruction (Roberto Batisti)
- Here’s to a Long Life! Albanian Reflections of Proto-Indo-European Semantics (Brian D. Joseph)
- Index