Abstracts of major papers

December 2000: History of Language Vol. 6 No. 2

• Wu Tieping: Developing The Comparative Study Of The Histories Of Chinese Linguistics And European Linguistics

  The present paper attempts to illustrate, by comparing segments of the histories of linguistics in China and abroad, that Qian Daxin (1728-1804), one of the representatives of the QianÐJia School, arrived at two significant linguistic discoveries much earlier than the Western linguists Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), K. Brugmans (1849-1919) and H. Osthoff (1847-1909), who are respectively credited with the two results. One of Qian's contributions is his discovery that there were only "heavy labials" (term used by Chinese traditional linguistics, i.e. bilabials: p, ph, bh), but no "light labials" (i.e. labiodentals: f, v) in archaic Chinese, and that the latter was derived from the former. The second great contribution of Qian Daxin's was the application of Chinese dialect data in his reconstruction of the archaic pronunciation of Chinese, which was also a whole century earlier than the work the Europeans did in this field.

• Damien Erwan Perrotin: The Position of Etruscan in the Western Mediterranean Ancient Linguistic Landscape

  This paper's goal is to expose what is known about the relatives of Etruscan (Rhaetic, Lemnian, Prehellenic A), and to explore the possible connections between these tongues and Indo-European, which has often been --- and is still being --- proposed as a likely parent of Etruscan

February 2000: History of Language Vol. 6 No. 1

• Elena Bashir: A Thematic Survey of Burushaski Research

  The study of Burushaski has made enormous strides since the early accounts published in 1854 and 1871 by the British explorers Cunningham and Hayward, and Burushaski can no longer be considered an understudied language. The early stages of research on the language are summarized chronologically in Grierson (1919) and Zarubin (1927), while work until 1970 is summarized in Klimov and Edel'man (1970). Tiffou (1998) discusses more recent work including ethnographical studies. The present article identifies major themes in Burushaski research and suggests directions for future research, along with providing a comprehensive bibliography.

• Étienne Tiffou: Current Research in Burushaski: A Survey

  This brief overview takes into consideration not only books and articles dealing with the language itself, but also, as already done in the Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics (Tiffou 1998), books and articles dealing with Burusho society and the very profound changes which it has experienced in the past twenty five years, inasmuch as it does not seem advisable to separate the study of the language from the study of the people who actually speak it. The article also tries to indicate the paths which research on Burushaski ought to follow in the foreseeable future.

July 1999: History of Language Vol. 5 No. 2

• Václav Blazek: Indo-European 'Hundred'

  This paper presents the data for the reconstruction of the word for 'hundred' in the various subfamilies of Indo-European, and then discusses likely internal etymologies for *k^m0tóm/k^m0tóm proposed in the literature, as well as the possibility of external parallels.

• Damien Erwan Perrotin: The Name of the Horse in Eurasian Languages: A Case of Cross-Family Diffusion

  The distribution of the various words for the horse in the languages of the Eurasian continent suggests that its status could be far more complex than it is generally thought. Indeed, their distribution does not seem to be linked with any one of the major linguistic families, so that it is possible to suspect large early diffusion phenomena, perhaps linked with the spreading of pastoral economy along the Steppes Belt.

January 1999: History of Language Vol. 5 No. 1

• Robert Lagerberg: The Stress of Russian Adjectives Containing the Suffix -iv(yj)

  This paper discusses the development in Modern Russian of the stress of the adjectival suffix -iv(yj), which is increasingly suffixal rather than dependent on the preceding morpheme. This is part of a larger drift in Russian from morphological to rhyme-bound stress, and serves as an apt illustration of lexical diffusion. Data is drawn from dictionaries ranging over the past three centuries.

September 1998: History of Language Vol. 4 No. 2

• H.M. Hubey: Quantitative Approaches to Historical Linguistics with Example Application to *PIE/IE

  This paper illustrates the application of various quantitative methods to historical linguistic data: in particular, graph-theoretical notions (graph-based clustering algorithms, cladistics, spanning trees). There is also discussion of the quantitative notions of phoneme and linguistic distance, and intuitive correlations are made between linguistic distances and real-world distances.

May 1998: Dhumbadji! Vol. 4 No. 1

• Václav Blazek: Uralic Numbers

  The author presents a detailed etymology of the numerals from one to ten within each of the three branches of Uralic --- Fenno-Permic, Ugric, and Samoyed --- as well as identifying instances where the words in the three branches may be related. In the process, he adduces data from other languages which may have come in contact with Uralic or be distantly related to it (such as Yukaghir and Indo-European), within the framework of East Nostratic. The author finds that the proto-Uralic numeral system can be reconstructed for 1-5; the remaining numerals are either borrowed, or native arithmetic derivations from simpler numbers (e.g. 8 as 10-2).

July 1997: Dhumbadji! Vol. 3 No. 2

• Stephan Atzert: Flemish and Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands in Belgium

  The author considers the historical background giving rise to the present linguistic situation of Flemish in Belgium.

• Alan R. Libert: Some Observations on the Syntax of [Greek] diekpleo:

  The author considers the syntactic behaviour of diekpleo: 'to sail out through' throughout Greek. The verb is of interest as it contains two prepositional prefixes, and the question to be determined is, whether the two complements corresponding to the respective pronouns are marked --- whether they are still prepositional, or the prepositional prefix replaces the preposition in the noun phrase, and whether there is any discernable diachronic tendency. The latter is answered in the negative, and the complements are found to remain largely prepositional.

• Anand Raman: A Database for Historical Chinese Phonology

  The author describes the history of the Middle Chinese rhyming dictionary Qie yun, its reliability, its use in Chinese historical phonology and dialectology, and its computerisation in the DOC 'Dictionary on Computer'.

January 1997: Dhumbadji! Vol. 3 No. 1

• John D. Bengtson: Vasco-Caucasic H^wanV 'mountain ~ forest'

  The author investigates cognates underlying the Vasco-Caucasic form H^wanV in Basque, Caucasic, and Burushic.

• Václav Blazek: Basic Word Lists of Ancient Languages of the Near East

  The author presents a Swadesh-100 basic word list of Ancient Near Eastern Languages: Sumerian (including Emesal), Akkadian, Elamite, Kassite, Hurrian, Urartian, and Hattic.

• Tobias Scheer: Des Ablauts gemeiner Gegner: Laryngale

  This paper shows that the distribution of the three markers Indo-European used to express aspect (i.e. Ablaut, Quantity, and Reduplication) is not arbitrary. Rather, a given verb selects one of these markers and only one according to its root-vowel. This result is arrived at on the basis of the evidence coming from Germanic. A seeming incompatibility arises between the rule derived and long [e]; however, the laryngeal theory shows that this difficulty can be resolved: "Laryngeals kill Ablaut". The correctness of this result is confirmed by comparison with Semitic. Rather than attribute this commonality between Indo-European and Semitic to a common Nostratic inheritence, the author sees this as a typological result --- and as confirmation of the post-velar articulation of Indo-European laryngeals.

June 1996: Dhumbadji! Vol. 2 No. 4

• Xiaokang Zhou: Borrowed Words in Chinese

  The characteristic properties of Chinese create a number of problems for assimilating borrowed words into the language (and representing them in its writing system), and since the 1950s, with a great influx of foreign lexicon, interest in this area has heightened. This paper examines what has actually happened to foreign words in the process of borrowing, and some of the changes to Chinese that can be associated with the influx of borrowed words.

December 1995: Dhumbadji! Vol. 2 No. 3

• Václav Blazek: Indo-European Personal Pronouns (1st & 2nd persons)

  A rich suppletivism and a complicated inflection are characteristic for Indo-European personal pronouns. The pronominal declension is different from the nominal, although the latter has influenced the former. The purposes of this contribution are as follows:

  1. An internal reconstruction of the pronominal microsystems in all groups of Indo-European languages, where the complete paradigms are known, and their projection onto the (late) proto-language level.
  2. A comparison of the reconstructed subsystems, and Proto-Indo-European reconstruction.
  3. A verification by means of an external comparison in typological and genetic plans.

May 1995: Dhumbadji! Vol. 2 No. 2

• Larry Trask: Basque: The Search for Relatives: Part 2

  In this paper (since published in Trask's The History of Basque), the author examines the case for a Basque lexical and phonological influence on Castillan Spanish; his findings are largely negative.

• John D. Bengston: Is Basque Isolated? (ad Trask [1994-95])

  The author responds to Trask's critique of external relations of Basque, defending the case for a Basque-North Caucasian connection.

Summer 1994/1995: Dhumbadji! Vol. 2 No. 1

• Larry Trask: Basque: The Search for Relatives.

  In this paper (since published in Trask's The History of Basque), Trask launches a devastating, influential, exhaustive and often hilarious critique of the various attempts through the years to connect the linguistic isolate Basque to sundry other language families.

• Jacques Guy: On Lexicostatistics and Glottochronology.

  The author makes a comprehensive and thorough critique of both glottochronology and lexicostatistics, and of their underlying assumptions: that there is a universal constant rate of lexical evolution, that the lexical items in a basic lexicostatistical list are of equal stability, and that there can exist a universal basic lexicon. He provides detailed criticisms and evaluations of work by Lees, Bergsland & Vogt, Dyen, James & Cole, Dyen, and Blust.

Winter 1994: Dhumbadji! Vol. 1 No. 4

• Patrick Ryan: Proto-Language "he" and "it" IE -l / -n Nouns.

  A phenomenon that has successfully resisted explanation since the inception of Indo-European studies is the odd variation of final -l in the nominative-accusative case stem-form opposed by -n in the oblique cases stem-form of a few important nouns. Probably the most notable of these is Indo-European sa/âwel, 'sun', which has the oblique case stem-form swen-. The author demonstrates that the Proto-Language of humanity had an animate definite article, n^há, which underlies Proto-Indo-European final -l in sa/âwel, and that the Proto-Language also had an inanimate definite article, ná, which underlies Proto-Indo-European final -n in swen-. In the derived languages, these articles became pronouns of the third person singular in a neutral social context for active verb constructions.

Summer 1993/1994: Dhumbadji! Vol. 1 No. 3

• Robert S. Bauer: Global Etymology of *KOLO "Wheel".

  A word which appears to have diffused globally amongst a wide range of human languages is the word for 'wheel': etymologically related forms for 'wheel' span a broad geographical area from Western Europe through the Middle East, Africa, and over to China and Japan. This paper primarily focuses attention on the linguistic comparison of words for 'wheel' from Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan languages. The paper is based on the premise that there is a connection between the cultural transmission of the wheel and horse-drawn chariot from the West into China and the phonetic similarity of words for wheel and wheeled-vehicle in Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan languages.

May 1993: Dhumbadji! Vol. 1 No. 2

• John Bengtson: The Macro-Caucasic Hypothesis.

  This paper outlines evidence for the existence of a Macro-Caucasic language phylum, encompassing Basque, Caucasic and Burushaski, and held to be at a time depth comparable to that of Indo-European.

• Paul Sidwell: The Nostratic Theory, an Introduction.

  The author gives a brief outline of the classical Nostratic theory, as promulgated by Illich-Svitych and his colleagues in Moscow.

• John Bowden: An Introduction to Oceanic Linguistic Prehistory.

  This paper begins by sketching out the external relationships of the Oceanic family, and examines the evidence for the existence of the group itself. It then considers the dispersal of Proto-Oceanic (POC) and the existence or otherwise of large subgroups within the Oceanic family. After discussion of some of the literature concerning the internal relationships of the smaller subgroups not already discussed, some conjectures are made about what the future may hold for the field. A selected bibliography is appended.

November 1992: Dhumbadji! Vol. 1 No. 1

• Paul Cubberley: The origins of the Glagolithic alphabet.

  The author evaluates the various proposed sources for the Glagolithic alphabet; while he accepts an origin in cursive Greek, he postulates that some letters were taken from Armenian.