Roots of Europe

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The building which houses the Roots of Europe centre at the Faculty of Humanities. Nyekua.jpg
The building which houses the Roots of Europe centre at the Faculty of Humanities.

Roots of Europe (full name: Roots of Europe – Language, Culture, and Migrations) is an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Copenhagen, focusing on prehistoric Europe. It is headed by Birgit Anette Olsen (2008-2013 by Jens Elmegård Rasmussen) and involves more than 40 linguists, archaeologists, geneticists and other scholars from universities in Europe and the USA. The centre was initiated in 2008 and is financed through the University of Copenhagen Programmes of Excellence. It has close ties to the local programme in Indo-European studies. It is physically based at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics and hosts the departmental collection of Indo-European linguistics handbooks.

University of Copenhagen University in Copenhagen, Denmark

The University of Copenhagen (UCPH) is the oldest university and research institution in Denmark. Founded in 1479 as a studium generale, it is the second oldest institution for higher education in Scandinavia after Uppsala University (1477). The university has 23,473 undergraduate students, 17,398 postgraduate students, 2,968 doctoral students and over 9,000 employees. The university has four campuses located in and around Copenhagen, with the headquarters located in central Copenhagen. Most courses are taught in Danish; however, many courses are also offered in English and a few in German. The university has several thousands of foreign students, about half of whom come from Nordic countries.

Prehistoric Europe period of history

Prehistoric Europe is the designation for the period of human presence in Europe before the start of recorded history, beginning in the Lower Paleolithic. As history progresses, considerable regional irregularities of cultural development emerge and increase. The region of the eastern Mediterranean is, due to its geographic proximity, greatly influenced and inspired by the classical Middle Eastern civilizations, and adopts and develops the earliest systems of communal organization and writing. The Histories of Herodotus is the oldest known European text that seeks to systematically record traditions, public affairs and notable events. In contrast, the European regions furthest away from the ancient centers of civilization tended to be the slowest, regarding acculturation. In Northern and Eastern Europe in particular, writing and systematic recording was only introduced in the context of Christianization, after 1000 CE.

Birgit Anette Olsen (Rasmussen) is a Danish linguist, professor at the University of Copenhagen and leader of the Roots of Europe research center. She is an expert on Proto-Indo-European and Indo-European languages in general, especially derivational morphology and the history of Armenian. She has also published important articles on linguistic reconstruction and the history of Latin, Greek, Anatolian and Germanic languages. She was married to Jens Elmegård Rasmussen, and her official surname is Rasmussen, but as a linguist she uses her maiden name Olsen to avoid confusion in references.

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Structure and activities

The common research projects are organized from Copenhagen. While the basic working group there mainly concentrates on the linguistic aspects, the external project members deal both with linguistics, religion and mythology, archaeology and genetics. An international advisory board covers all of the basic fields. From 2013 onwards, the centre also functions as an umbrella for several new research projects, which do not form part of the original programme but are founded by the VELUX foundation and the Danish Research Council for the Humanities. Research results emerging from the projects are published mainly in the book series Copenhagen Studies in Indo-European.

VELUX

VELUX is a Danish manufacturing company that specializes in roof windows and skylights. The company is headquartered in Hørsholm, Denmark.

Copenhagen Studies in Indo-European is an academic book series on Indo-European studies and related subjects.
The series was founded in 1999 and is published by Museum Tusculanum Press. Its chief editor was Jens Elmegård Rasmussen from its initiation until his death in 2013. The current chief editor is Birgit Anette Olsen.

Heads of centre

Jens Elmegård Rasmussen was associate professor of Indo-European Studies and head of the Roots of Europe research center at the University of Copenhagen from its initiation in 2008 until his death. He was an expert on Proto-Indo-European and Indo-European languages in general, especially morphophonemics, but he also published articles on the history of Eskimo–Aleut languages and linguistic diachrony. He supported the Indo-Uralic and Eurasiatic hypotheses.

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Aarhus University public university in Aarhus, Denmark

Aarhus University is a public research university located in Aarhus, Denmark. Founded in 1928, it is Denmark's second oldest university and the largest, with a total of 44,500 enrolled students as of 1 January 2013. Aarhus University is placed in the top 100 in most prestigious ranking lists of the world's best universities. The university belongs to the Coimbra Group and Utrecht Network of European universities and is a member of the European University Association. The university comprises four faculties in Arts, Science and Technology, Health, and Business and Social Sciences and has a total of twenty-seven departments and is home to over thirty internationally recognised research centres, including fifteen Centres of Excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation. The business school within Aarhus University, called Aarhus BSS, holds the EFMD Equis accreditation, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and the Association of MBAs (AMBA). This makes the business school of Aarhus University one of the few in the world to hold the so-called Triple Crown accreditation. Times Higher Education ranks Aarhus University in the top 10 of the most beautiful universities in Europe.

Indo-European studies

Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European (PIE), and its speakers, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, including their society and mythology. The studies cover where the language originated and how it spread. This article also lists Indo-European scholars, centres, journals and book series.

The verb go is an irregular verb in the English language. It has a wide range of uses; its basic meaning is "to move from one place to another". Apart from the copular verb be, the verb go is the only English verb to have a suppletive past tense, namely went.

Andrew Littleton Sihler is an American linguist and comparative Indo-Europeanist.

Robert Stephen Paul Beekes was Emeritus Professor of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University and the author of many monographs on the Proto-Indo-European language.

Celtic studies academic discipline

Celtic studies or Celtology is the academic discipline occupied with the study of any sort of cultural output relating to the Celtic people. This ranges from linguistics, literature and art history, archaeology and history, the focus lying on the study of the various Celtic languages, living and extinct. The primary areas of focus are the six Celtic languages currently in use: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton.

Jens Olsens World Clock

Jens Olsen's World Clock or Verdensur is an advanced astronomical clock which is displayed in Copenhagen City Hall.

Scandinavian studies field of study

Scandinavian studies is an interdisciplinary academic field of area studies, mainly in the United States and Germany, that covers topics related to Scandinavia and the Nordic countries, including languages, literatures, histories, cultures and societies. The term Scandinavia mainly refers to Denmark, Norway and Sweden, although the term Scandinavian in an ethnic, cultural and linguistic sense also refers to the peoples and languages of the Faroe Islands and Iceland, and the Scandinavian-speaking minority in Finland. Scandinavian studies does not exist as a separate field within Scandinavia or the Nordic countries themselves, as its scope would be considered far too broad to be treated meaningfully within a single discipline. The closest related field in Scandinavia would be the more narrow discipline of Nordic linguistics, which covers North Germanic languages. A major focus of Scandinavian studies is the teaching of Scandinavian languages, especially the three large languages Danish, Norwegian and Swedish.

Peter Schrijver, is a Dutch linguist and a professor of Celtic languages at Utrecht University and a researcher of ancient Indo-European linguistics. He worked previously at Leiden University and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Tocharian and Indo-European Studies (TIES) is a scholarly journal on Tocharian in the Indo-European context, established in 1987 by the Icelandic linguist Jörundur Hilmarsson. The journal initially appeared in Reykjavík, Iceland, but after Hilmarsson's death in 1992, the Danish linguist Jens Elmegård Rasmussen became the new executive editor, and the journal is currently based at Museum Tusculanum Press in Copenhagen. Until 2008 it was based at C.A. Reitzel Publishers Ltd., also in Copenhagen. When Rasmussen died in 2013, Birgit Anette Olsen became the new executive editor.

The Indo-European Etymological Dictionary is a research project of the Department of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University, initiated in 1991 by Peter Schrijver and others. It is financially supported by the Faculty of Humanities and Centre for Linguistics of Leiden University, Brill Publishers, and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.

Marko Snoj Slovenian linguist

Marko Snoj is an Indo-Europeanist, Slavist, Albanologist, and etymologist employed at the Fran Ramovš Institute for Slovene Language of the Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. As of 2008 he is the director of the institute. He has made numerous scholarly contributions to Indo-European linguistics, particularly in the realms of Slovene and Albanian, and is noted for his work in advancing Slavic etymology in both scholarly and popular domains. He is an associate member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

James Clackson is a British linguist and Indo-Europeanist.

Gretty Mizrahi Mirdal is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen, and has been since October 2012 the director of the Paris Institute for Advanced Study.

Narten present is a proposed inflectional class of the Proto-Indo-European verb, named after the Indo-Iranianist Johanna Narten who posited its existence in 1968. It is characterized by accent on the root in all of the person-number forms.

Jens Rasmussen may refer to:

References