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Teeter's Law
Teeter's law is a wry observation about the biases of historical linguists, explaining how different investigators can arrive at radically divergent conceptions of the proto-language of a family: Although the law is named after the Americanist linguist Karl Teeter, it apparently does not appear in any of Teeter's works. It is customarily quoted from a 1976 review by the Indo-European linguist Calvert Watkins of Paul Friedrich's ''Proto-Indo-European syntax: the order of meaningful elements''. Watkins argued that Friedrich, after criticizing other scholars for overemphasizing particular branches of the family, had based his reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European syntax entirely on Homeric Greek Homeric Greek is the form of the Greek language that was used by Homer in the ''Iliad'', ''Odyssey'', and Homeric Hymns. It is a literary dialect of Ancient Greek consisting mainly of Ionic Greek, Ionic, with some Aeolic Greek, Aeolic forms, a few .... References Works cited * * * {{c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Historical Linguist
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: # to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages # to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics) # to develop general theories about how and why language changes # to describe the history of speech communities # to study the history of words, i.e. etymology Historical linguistics is founded on the Uniformitarian Principle, which is defined by linguist Donald Ringe as: History and development Western modern historical linguistics dates from the late-18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents dating back to antiquity. At first, historical linguistics served as the cornerstone of comparative linguistics, primarily as a tool fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattested, or partially attested at best. They are reconstructed by way of the comparative method. In the family tree metaphor, a proto-language can be called a mother language. Occasionally, the German term ''Ursprache'' (from ''Ur-'' "primordial, original", and ''Sprache'' "language", ) is used instead. It is also sometimes called the ''common'' or ''primitive'' form of a language (e.g. Common Germanic, Primitive Norse). In the strict sense, a proto-language is the most recent common ancestor of a language family, immediately before the family started to diverge into the attested ''daughter languages''. It is therefore equivalent with the ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'' of a language family. Moreover, a group of languages ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indigenous Languages Of The Americas
Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large number of language isolates), as well as a number of extinct languages that are unclassified because of a lack of data. Many proposals have been made to relate some or all of these languages to each other, with varying degrees of success. The most notorious is Joseph Greenberg's Amerind hypothesis, which however nearly all specialists reject because of severe methodological flaws; spurious data; and a failure to distinguish cognation, contact, and coincidence. Nonetheless, there are indications that some of the recognized families are related to each other, such as widespread similarities in pronouns (e.g., ''n''/''m'' is a common pattern for 'I'/'you' across western North America, and ''ch''/''k''/''t'' for 'I'/'you'/'we' is similarly ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Karl Teeter
Karl van Duyn Teeter (March 2, 1929 – April 20, 2007) was an American linguist known especially for his work on the Algic languages. Life and work Teeter was born in Berkeley, California, to Charles Edwin Teeter, Jr., a college professor of physical chemistry, and Lura May (née Shaffner) Teeter, later in life a college professor in philosophy. Raised in Lexington, Massachusetts, he dropped out of high school and joined the United States Army, where he served as a Supply Sergeant from 1951 to 1954. In 1951, Teeter married Anita Maria Bonacorsi, the daughter of Sicilian immigrants. Sent to Japan to serve in the occupation forces, he became deeply interested in the Japanese language and on returning received a bachelor's degree in Oriental Languages from the University of California at Berkeley. There he continued his studies as a graduate student in linguistics. His dissertation, supervised by Mary Haas, was a description of the soon-to-be-extinct Wiyot language. Teeter's wor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indo-European Languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; and another nine subdivisions that are now extinct. Today, the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are English, Hindi–Urdu, Spanish, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, German, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million native speakers; many others are small and in danger of extinction. In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Calvert Watkins
Calvert Watkins ( /ˈwɒtkɪnz/; March 13, 1933 – March 20, 2013) was an American linguist and philologist, known for his book '' How to Kill a Dragon''. He was a professor of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and after retirement went to serve as professor-in-residence at UCLA. Early life Family Calvert Watkins was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on March 13, 1933 to Ralph James Watkins, an economist and government advisor, and Willye Ward, a Spanish teacher who translated the personal memoirs of former Mexican president Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Much of Watkins's childhood was spent in New York City, and he graduated from Friends Seminary in Manhattan before beginning his career at Harvard University. Watkins's early exposure to Latin and Greek inspired him at the age of fifteen to decide to become an Indo-Europeanist. Education Watkins received his initial undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1954, graduating summa cum laude, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Friedrich (linguist)
Paul William Friedrich (October 22, 1927 – August 11, 2016) was an American anthropologist, linguist, poet, and Professor of Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He studied at Harvard with Roman Jakobson, and received his Ph.D. from Yale under the supervision of Sidney Mintz. He specialized in Slavic languages and literature, and in the ethnographic and linguistic study of the Purépecha people of Western Mexico, as well as in the role of poetics and aesthetics in creating linguistic and discursive patterns. Among his best known works were ''Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village'' (1970; 1977), ''The Princes of Naranja: An Essay in Anthrohistorical Method'' (1987), both ethnographic works describing local politics in a small community in the Mexican state of Michoacan. And in linguistics his works ''The Tarascan Suffixes of Locative Space: Meaning and Morphotactics'' (1971) and ''A Phonology of Tarascan'' (1973) were among the most detailed as well as earliest modern ling ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language, and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE or its daughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the comparative method) were developed as a result. PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BC to 2500 BC during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian ste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Homeric Greek
Homeric Greek is the form of the Greek language that was used by Homer in the ''Iliad'', ''Odyssey'', and Homeric Hymns. It is a literary dialect of Ancient Greek consisting mainly of Ionic Greek, Ionic, with some Aeolic Greek, Aeolic forms, a few from Arcadocypriot Greek, Arcadocypriot, and a written form influenced by Attic Greek, Attic. It was later named Epic Greek because it was used as the language of epic poetry, typically in dactylic hexameter, by poets such as Hesiod and Theognis of Megara. Compositions in Epic Greek may date from Nonnus, as late as the 5th century CE, and it only fell out of use by the end of Classical antiquity. Main features In the following description, only forms that differ from those of later Greek are discussed. Omitted forms can usually be predicted from patterns seen in Ionic Greek. Phonology Homeric Greek is like Ionic Greek, and unlike Attic Greek, Classical Attic, in shifting almost all cases of long to : thus, Homeric for Attic "Troy", "h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adages
An adage (; Latin: adagium) is a memorable and usually philosophical aphorism that communicates an important truth derived from experience, custom, or both, and that many people consider true and credible because of its longeval tradition, i.e. being handed down generation to generation, or memetic replication. Variations and nature An adage may warn against a failure to plan, be interesting observations, ethical rules, or skeptical comments on life in general, such as "do not count your chickens before they hatch", "do not burn your bridges", and . Some adages are products of folk wisdom that attempt to summarize a basic truth; these are generally known as " proverbs" or "bywords". An adage that describes a general moral rule is a " maxim". A pithy expression that has not necessarily gained credibility by tradition, but is distinguished by especial depth or excellent style is denominated an "aphorism", while one distinguished by wit or irony is often denominated an "e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
