Studies in Germanic, Indo-European and Indo-Uralic.

The red thread which runs through this book is a quest for relative chronology of linguistic developments. The probability of a reconstruction can be judged against the background of the transitions which it implies for the linguistic system as a whole. The reconstructions are always bottom-up, never top-down. It follows that the chapters on Germanic can be read without reference to the Indo-European background and that the Indo-Uralic part of the book can be left out of consideration if one does not want to look beyond Proto-Indo-European.
The initial chapters of the book offer an introduction to the background and methodology of the reconstructions with a discussion of the spread of the Indo-Europeans, the role of general linguistics in linguistic reconstruction, the nature of mixed languages, the origin of the Goths, the relations between Indo-European, Uralic and Caucasian languages, and the structure and development of Proto-Indo-European. The following chapters deal with the phonology and morphosyntax of Indo-European, Greek, Indo-Iranian and Tocharian. These are followed by a discussion of Germanic phonology, verb classes, verbal and nominal inflexion, and specific issues in English, German and Scandinavian languages. After a short treatment of Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic and Italo-Celtic topics, the volume is concluded with a discussion of Anatolian and Indo-Uralic phonology and morphosyntax. The book is of interest to students of Germanic, Indo-European and historical linguistics.

The author is Professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He has published widely on Germanic, Celtic, Baltic, Slavic, 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), Baltica & Balto-Slavica (2009), and numerous articles in Historische Sprachforschung, Journal of Indo-European Studies, North-Western European Language Evolution, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik, Baltistica, Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics, Ériu, Lingua, and other journals and edited volumes.