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A site devoted to origins of words and slang phrases.

intro | why | theory | families | links | biblio Historical Linguistics What ancient scripts ultimately capture is part or whole of a tongue spoken in antiquity. However, as you may have noticed, all human languages evolve over time. For instance, English poems written in Shakespeare's time don't rhyme correctly anymore, but a look at their archaic spelling indicates that they should rhyme.

LRC IE Documentation Center Links List IE Documentation Center The University of Texas at Austin IE Languages IE Linguistics Lehmann's Reader PIE Phonology PIE Phonemes Semantic Fields PIE Roots English Lexicon IE Culture IE Texts Journal of IE Studies Scholars' Publications The Indo-European Language Family For a map showing where languages are now spoken in Europe and Anatolia, see Titus' ...

Genetic Distance and Language Affinities Between Autochthonous Human Populations The first two of the following tables are largely or entirely drawn from one article in Scientific American, Genes, peoples and languages, by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (November, 1991). This reported the results of genetic mapping of human DNA affinities, the newest theories about larger families of human languages, ...

Everything you ever wanted to know about Proto-Indo-European (and the comparative method), but were afraid to ask! Kathleen Hubbard's answer to the question How do we know what we know about Proto-Indo-European and other languages that died out before they were written down I have also appended some bibliography at the end. The hard-core indo-europeanist may be interested in the TITUS ...

Only your etymologist knows!) About 6, 000 years ago a tribe of people living in the Eurasian Plain north of the Dnepr River in what is now the Ukraine, spoke a language from which virtually all the languages of present-day Europe and India developed. It is commonly referred to as 'Indo-European'. As the original tribe expanded, various segments of it moved farther and farther away from the ...

Words in English Linguistics/English 215 Prof. S. Kemmer Chronology of Events in the History of English pre-600 A.D. THE PRE-ENGLISH PERIOD ca. 3000 B.C. (or 6000 B.C ) Proto-Indo-European spoken in Baltic area. (or Anatolia ) ca. 1000 B.C. After many migrations, the various branches of Indo-European have become distinct. Celtic becomes most widespread branch of I.E. in Europe; Celtic peoples ...

Home page for Kjell Gustafson, TMH, KTH ...

Teaching Historical Linguistics Steen Schousboe, Copenhagen Abstract In the course of the l9th century, English was established as an independent field of study in the University of Copenhagen. In l883 a fairly specific curriculum was introduced , and from the beginning the history of the English language as well as the reading of Old English and Middle English texts were obligatory disciplines ...

Paper analyzing the Sumerian proto-language.

Linguistics 105 * Words and Sounds Lecture Number Twenty One Tracking Linguistic Drift: The Comparative Method Linguistic Drift Causes Imperfect transfer between generations Heavy lexical borrowing: English / /: garage, rouge, arbitrage Foreign accents (from heavy immigration) Phonological Change Syncope: courtesy curtsy aeroplane airplane camera Latin fem na French femme Latin num rum French ...

StudyWeb Relations between Indoeuropean and Afroasiatic Languages Relations between Indoeuropean and Semitic languages have often been maintained. Trubetzkoy, for example, has claimed that Indoeuropean languages developed from a Semitic-similiar stage to an Uralic-similiar one. On the other hand it is well known nowadays that the Semitic languages are one of six coordinate branches of the ...