Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans

Abstract

“Gamkrelidze and Ivanov’s wide-ranging and interdisciplinary work, superbly translated from Russian, is a must for every student of Indo-European prehistory. Its erudition is unsurpassed, and its unorthodox conclusions are a continuing challenge.” Prof. Dr. Martin Haspelmath, Max-Planck-Institut für Evolutionäre Anthropologie The authors propose a revision of views on a number of central issues of Indo-European studies. Based on findings of typology, they suggest a new analysis of the phonological system of Proto-Indo-European (the ‘Glottalic Theory’); they offer novel assumptions about the relative chronology of changes in PIE vowels and laryngeals. Their conclusions are compared with data from Proto-Kartvelian. In the second part of the book, semantically organized presentation of material from the lexicon is combined with analyses of the use of forms and formulae in a broadly defined cultural context. Again similarities with properties of primarily Kartvelian and Semitic are described , and extended close contacts with these language families are postulated. This necessarily leads to a proposal to place the hypothetical Urheimat of the Indo-Europeans in the region south of the Caucasus. Volume and II of the original Russian edition have been combined in the English version as Part I; the Bibliography and Indexes are published as Part II.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 333 citations exist upstream.