History
The LRC was founded by Winfred Lehmann in 1961. In the early days, research efforts at the LRC concentrated on machine translation (MT) -- the translation of texts from one human language to another with the aid of computers, very developed nowadays in the field of language industry—funded by the USAF and other sponsors. The LRC concentrated on German-English translation, though a copy of the Russian Master Dictionary was deposited at the LRC after the ALPAC report. After a general hiatus ca. 1975-78, new funding led to the development by Jonathan Slocum and others of a new system with the same name (the METAL MT system), but with new sets of tools for linguists and vastly greater success, resulting in the delivery a production prototype then later a full-fledged commercial MT system. MT R&D continued at the LRC, with funding by various sponsors, until well into the 1990s.
From its early years to the present, the LRC has mounted a number of smaller projects resulting in the publication of significant works relating to Indo-European languages and/or their common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. The hallmark of this work has been the use of computers to transcribe texts and prepare them for publication. A prominent example of the LRC using computers to prepare texts for print publication is the book by Winfred P. Lehmann, A Gothic Etymological Dictionary (Leiden: Brill, 1986). The final print-ready version was produced with the aid of a laser printer (exotic new technology, in those days) using, for the various languages included in the entries, approximately 500 special characters—many of them designed at the Center. This was the first major etymological dictionary for Indo-European languages to be produced with the aid of computers.
In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language.. Every set of cognates constitute a word family.
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards to infer the properties of that ancestor. The comparative method may be contrasted with the method of internal reconstruction in which the internal development of a single language is inferred by the analysis of features within that language. Ordinarily, both methods are used together to reconstruct prehistoric phases of languages; to fill in gaps in the historical record of a language; to discover the development of phonological, morphological and other linguistic systems and to confirm or to refute hypothesised relationships between 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; another nine subdivisions are now extinct.
Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalism. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics. He made significant contributions to Indo-European historical linguistics, the description of Austronesian languages, and description of languages of the Algonquian family.
The Tocharianlanguages, also known as the Arśi-Kuči, Agnean-Kuchean or Kuchean-Agnean languages, are an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family spoken by inhabitants of the Tarim Basin, the Tocharians. The languages are known from manuscripts dating from the 5th to the 8th century AD, which were found in oasis cities on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin and the Lop Desert. The discovery of these languages in the early 20th century contradicted the formerly prevalent idea of an east–west division of the Indo-European language family as centum and satem languages, and prompted reinvigorated study of the Indo-European family. Scholars studying these manuscripts in the early 20th century identified their authors with the Tokharoi, a name used in ancient sources for people of Bactria (Tokharistan). Although this identification is now believed to be mistaken, "Tocharian" remains the usual term for these languages.
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
- 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
- to explore the impact of cultural and social factors on language evolution.
Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
August Schleicher was a German linguist. Schleicher studied the Proto-Indo-European language and devised theories concerning historical linguistics. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language. To show how Indo-European might have looked, he created a short tale, Schleicher's fable, to exemplify the reconstructed vocabulary and aspects of Indo-European society inferred from it.
Hittite, also known as Nesite, is an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken by the Hittites, a people of Bronze Age Anatolia who created an empire centred on Hattusa, as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. The language, now long extinct, is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BC, with isolated Hittite loanwords and numerous personal names appearing in an Old Assyrian context from as early as the 20th century BC, making it the earliest attested use of the Indo-European languages.
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages.
Etymology is the scientific study of the origin and evolution of a word's semantic meaning across time, including its constituent morphemes and phonemes. It is a subfield of historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics, and draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics in order to construct a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings that a morpheme, phoneme, word, or sign has carried across time.
Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness.
The Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch was published in 1959 by the Austrian-German comparative linguist and Celtic languages expert Julius Pokorny. It is an updated and slimmed-down reworking of the three-volume Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der indogermanischen Sprachen.
Old Irish, also called Old Gaelic, is the oldest form of the Goidelic/Gaelic language for which there are extensive written texts. It was used from c. 600 to c. 900. The main contemporary texts are dated c. 700–850; by 900 the language had already transitioned into early Middle Irish. Some Old Irish texts date from the 10th century, although these are presumably copies of texts written at an earlier time. Old Irish is thus forebear to Modern Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic.
Classical Armenian is the oldest attested form of the Armenian language. It was first written down at the beginning of the 5th century, and all Armenian literature from then through the 18th century is in Classical Armenian. Many ancient manuscripts originally written in Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Syriac and Latin survive only in Armenian translation.
Winfred Philip Lehmann was an American linguist who specialized in historical, Germanic, and Indo-European linguistics. He was for many years a professor and head of departments for linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and served as president of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Modern Language Association. Lehmann was also a pioneer in machine translation. He lectured a large number of future scholars at Austin, and was the author of several influential works on linguistics.
Grundriß der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen is a major work of historical linguistics by Karl Brugmann and Berthold Delbrück, published in two editions between 1886 and 1916. Brugmann treated phonology and morphology, and Delbrück treated syntax. The grammar of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is reconstructed from those of its daughter languages known in the late 19th century. The work represents a major step in Indo-European studies, after Franz Bopp's Comparative Grammar of 1833 and August Schleicher's Compendium of 1871. Brugmann's neogrammarian re-evaluation of PIE resulted in a view that in its essence continued to be valid until present times.
The king and the god is the title of a short dialogue composed in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language. It is loosely based on the "King Harishchandra" episode of Aitareya Brahmana (7.14). S. K. Sen asked a number of Indo-Europeanists to reconstruct the PIE "parent" of the text.
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.
The Germanic parent language (GPL), also known as Pre-Germanic Indo-European (PreGmc) or Pre-Proto-Germanic (PPG), is the stage of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family that was spoken c. 2500 BC – c. 500 BC, after the branch had diverged from Proto-Indo-European but before it evolved into Proto-Germanic during the First Germanic Sound Shift.
