The Languages and Linguistics of Europe PDF Download

Author: Bernd Kortmann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110220253
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 934

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Book Description
Open publication> The Languages and Linguistics ofEurope: A Comprehensive Guideis part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The book supplies profiles of the language families of Europe, including the sign languages. It also discusses the areal typology, paying attention to the Standard Average European, Balkan, Baltic and Mediterranean convergence areas. Separate chapters deal with the old and new minority languages and with non-standard varieties. A major focus is language politics and policies, including discussions of the special status of English, the relation between language and the church, language and the school, and standardization. The history of European linguistics is another focus as is the history of multilingual European 'empires' and their dissolution. The volume is especially geared towards a graduate and advanced undergraduatereadership. It has been designed such that it can be used, as a whole or in parts, as a textbook, the first of its kind, for graduate programmes with a focus on the linguistic (and linguistics) landscape of Europe.

Author: Andrii Danylenko
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311063922X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
Conceptually, the volume focuses on the relationship of the three key notions that essentially triggered the inception and subsequent realization of this project, to wit, language contact, grammaticalization, and areal grouping. Fully concentrated on the areal-typological and historical dimensions of Slavic, the volume offers new insights into a number of theoretical issues, including language contact, grammaticalization, mechanisms of borrowing, the relationship between areal, genetic, and typological sampling, conservative features versus innovation, and socio-linguistic aspects of linguistic alliances conceived of both synchronically and diachronically. The volume integrates new approaches towards the areal-typological profiling of Slavic as a member of several linguistic areas within Europe, including SAE, the Balkan Sprachbund and Central European groupings(s) like the Danubian or Carpathian areas, as well as the Carpathian-Balkan linguistic macroarea. Some of the chapters focus on structural affinities between Slavic and other European languages that arose as a result of either grammatical replication or borrowing. A special emphasis is placed on contact-induced grammaticalization in Slavic micro-languages

Author: Gaston Dorren
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802190944
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Six thousand years. Sixty languages. One “brisk and breezy” whirlwind armchair tour of Europe “bulg[ing] with linguistic trivia” (The Wall Street Journal). Take a trip of the tongue across the continent in this fascinating, hilarious and highly edifying exploration of the many ways and whys of Euro-speaks—its idiosyncrasies, its histories, commonalities, and differences. Most European languages are descended from a single ancestor, a language not unlike Sanskrit known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short), but the continent’s ever-changing borders and cultures have given rise to a linguistic and cultural diversity that is too often forgotten in discussions of Europe as a political entity. Lingo takes us into today’s remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that one never use the word “you.” “In this bubbly linguistic endeavor, journalist and polyglot Dorren thoughtfully walks readers through the weird evolution of languages” (Publishers Weekly), and not just the usual suspects—French, German, Yiddish, irish, and Spanish, Here, too are the esoteric—Manx, Ossetian, Esperanto, Gagauz, and Sami, and that global headache called English. In its sixty bite-sized chapters, Dorret offers quirky and hilarious tidbits of illuminating facts, and also dispels long-held lingual misconceptions (no, Eskimos do not have 100 words for snow). Guaranteed to change the way you think about language, Lingo is a “lively and insightful . . . unique, page-turning book” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).

Author: Roger D. Woodard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139469320
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 23

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Book Description
This book, derived from the acclaimed Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, describes the ancient languages of Europe, for the convenience of students and specialists working in that area. Each chapter of the work focuses on an individual language or, in some instances, a set of closely related varieties of a language. Providing a full descriptive presentation, each of these chapters examines the writing system(s), phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of that language, and places the language within its proper linguistic and historical context. The volume brings together an international array of scholars, each a leading specialist in ancient language study. While designed primarily for scholars and students of linguistics, this work will prove invaluable to all whose studies take them into the realm of ancient language.

Author: Bernd Heine
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191538116
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The languages and dialects of Europe, this book shows, are becoming increasingly alike. Furthermore this unifying process goes at least as far back as the Roman empire, is accelerating, and affects every one of Europe's 150 or so languages including those of different families such as Basque and Finnish. The changes are by no means restricted to lexical borrowing but involve every grammatical aspect of the language. They are usually so minute that neither native speakers nor trained linguists notice them. But they accumulate and give rise to new grammatical structures that lead in turn to new patterns of areal relationship. Professor Heine and Professor Kuteva look for the causes of linguistic change in cultural and economic exchanges across national and regional boundaries and in the processes that occur when speakers learn or are in close contact with another language. Testing their data and conclusions against findings from elsewhere in the world, the authors reconstruct and reveal when, how, and why common grammatical structures have evolved and continue to evolve in processes of change that will, they argue, transform the linguistic landscape of Europe. The book is written in clear, non-technical language. It will appeal to scholars and students of language change and variation in Europe and elsewhere. It will also interest everyone concerned to understand the nature of language and language change.

Author: Björn Rothstein
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027205876
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 669

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Book Description
This book is the first comprehensive survey of mood in the languages of Europe. It gives readers access to a collection of data on mood. Each article presents the mood system of a specific European language in a way that readers not familiar with this language are able to understand and to interpret the data. The articles contain information on the morphology and semantics of the mood system, the possible combinations of tense and mood morphology, and the possible uses of the non-indica-tive mood(s). The papers address the explanation of mood from an empirical and descriptive perspective. This book is of interest to scholars of mood and modality, language contact, and areal linguistics and typology.

Author: Östen Dahl
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 311019709X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 865

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Book Description
The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

Author: Jared Klein
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110542439
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1025

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Book Description
This book presents the most comprehensive coverage of the field of Indo-European Linguistics in a century, focusing on the entire Indo-European family and treating each major branch and most minor languages. The collaborative work of 120 scholars from 22 countries, Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics combines the exhaustive coverage of an encyclopedia with the in-depth treatment of individual monographic studies.

Author: Guus Extra
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 9781853595097
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
The book offers demographic, sociolinguistic, and educational perspectives on the status of both regional and immigrant languages in Europe and in a wider international context. From a cross-national point of view, empirical evidence on the status of these other languages of multicultural Europe is brought together in a combined frame of reference.

Author: Glanville Price
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing
ISBN: 9780631220398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
This is an authoritative reference guide to all the languages of Europe, covering nearly three hundred languages and language families. It focuses on extant languages but includes all languages known to have been spoken in Europe in the past. Speech varieties whose status as dialects rather than languages is a matter of debate either have separate entries or are considered under other headings, with appropriate cross references. The encyclopedia includes entries on non-European languages now spoken by substantial communities in Europe (such as Punjabi and Chinese in Britain and Arabic in France) and on the major non-Latin alphabets used for the transcription of European languages. The aim of the book is to provide surveys of the origins, historical development and, in the case of living languages, contemporary position of each language. Bibliographical addenda to articles list grammars, dictionaries, and works on historical and sociolinguistic topics. Written by an international team of scholars, many of them among the foremost authorities in their field, the Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe is of interest to all those involved in the study of language, linguistics or cultural history.