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Baltica & Balto-Slavica

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This volume offers a discussion of the phonological, accentological and morphological development of the Baltic languages and their Indo-European origins. The first half of this book is about Balti...
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  • 01 January 2009
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This volume offers a discussion of the phonological, accentological and morphological development of the Baltic languages and their Indo-European origins. The first half of this book is about Baltic historical phonology and morphology and the second half is about Prussian. The emphasis is on the relative chronology of sound changes and on the development of the flexional and derivational categories of nouns, pronouns and verbs. It is argued that the Balto-Slavic acute tone was a glottal stop which developed from the Indo-European laryngeals and from Winter’s law and that the original circumflex continues other vocalic sequences. Special points of attention are the gen.pl. endings, ē and ī/jā stems, and thematic and athematic present endings. The second half of the book contains a comparative analysis of the three Prussian catechisms, resulting in the conclusion that they represent three consecutive stages of a real linguistic system. It includes a discussion of the Prussian accent shift, initial vowels, diphthongs, infinitives, verb classes, participles and traces of ablauting paradigms. The final part of the book offers a full linguistic interpretation of the three Prussian catechisms on the basis of the preceding chapters, followed by a list of references and a word index. The book is of interest to Balticists, Slavicists, Indo-Europeanists, and other historical linguists.
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Price: $186.00
Pages: 440
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Leiden Studies in Indo-European
Publication Date: 01 January 2009
ISBN: 9789042026520
Format: Hardcover
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”Kortlandt has a truly impressive knowledge of various linguistic levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics) of a high number of language families. He has an enviable ability to take in and digest huge amounts of data and organize them in systems that others have not seen before him. Perhaps as a consequence of these extraordinary skills, Kortlandt takes an approach to linguistic reconstruction that distinguishes him from many other comparative linguists. … This book is a useful place to look for inspiration and get a refreshing alternative to the variants of the standard doctrine found in most other publications about Indo-European and Balto-Slavic comparative linguistics” in: Kratylos, Jahrgang 56 (2011)
Frederik Kortlandt is Professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He has published widely on Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Armenian and other languages and on linguistic theory. His publications include Modelling the phoneme (1972), Slavic accentuation (1975), Armeniaca (2003), Italo-Celtic origins and prehistoric development of the Irish language (2007), and numerous articles in Baltistica, Res Balticae, Linguistica Baltica, Baltu Filoloģija, Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics, Historische Sprachforschung, Journal of Indo-European Studies, Lingua, and other journals and edited volumes.