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Distributed for Museum Tusculanum Press

The Linguistic Roots of Europe

Origin and Development of European Languages

Most of us know of the Indo-European roots of European languages, but how did this precursor language take hold and what did Europe look like before it did so? This book explores the continent before the spread of the Indo-Europeans, examines its indigenous population and the contacts it had with Indo-European and Uralic immigrants, and, ultimately, asks how these origins led to the development of that crucial singularity for Europe’s languages. Drawing on archaeology, religious studies, and palaeography, the contributors offer a detailed and comprehensive picture of Europe’s linguistic prehistory and, in turn, its cultural one. 

320 pages | 6 3/8 x 9 1/2 | © 2015

Copenhagen Studies in Indo-European

Language and Linguistics: General Language and Linguistics


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Table of Contents

In memoriam Jens Elmegård Rasmussen (1944-2013)

Robert Mailhammer (For the Editors)
Investigating Languages in Prehistory: The Linguistic roots of Europe

Marc Vander Linden 
An impossible dialogue? On the interface between archaeology, historical linguistics and comparative philology

Robert Mailhammer 
Diversity vs. uniformity: Europe before the arrival of the Indo-European languages. A comparison with prehistoric Australia 

Petri Kallio 
The language contact situation in prehistoric Northeastern Europe

Joseph Salmons
Language shift and the Indo-Europeanization of Europe 

Iva Welscher
Slav. Bara, lat. Mare, dt. Meer: Toponyme und Appellative mit der alteuropäischen Basis *bar-

Eduardo Blasco Ferrer
Paläosardisch und Paläobaskisch

Alexandra Grieser
Wurzeln der Sprache als Ursprung von Religion? F.M. Müller und die philologische Konstrucktion von Religion zwischen Religions- und Sprachwissenschaft

Benjamin Meisnitzer
The archaeology-language conundrum: Is there still anything to be learned from etymology? Semitic influence on German, with a special consideration of Arabic and Hebrew

Reinhard G. Lehmann
,,Gesegnet sei, wer die Schrift erfand": Aus der Frühgeschichte des Alphabets 

Theo Vennemann
Origins of runic writing: A comparison of theories

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