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Osthoff's Law
Osthoff's law is an Indo-European sound law which states that long vowels shorten when followed by a resonant (Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) *''m'', *''n'', *''l'', *''r'', *''y'', *''w''), followed in turn by another consonant (i.e. in a closed syllable environment). It is named after German Indo-Europeanist Hermann Osthoff, who first formulated it. Overview The law operated in most of the Proto-Indo-European daughter languages, with notable exceptions being the Indo-Iranian and Tocharian branches in which the difference between long and short PIE diphthongs was clearly preserved. Compare: * PIE ''*dyēws'' "skyling, sky god" > Vedic Sanskrit ''dyā́us'', but Ancient Greek , with an ordinary diphthong. The term ''Osthoff's law'' is usually properly applied to the described phenomenon in Ancient Greek, which itself was an independent innovation from similar developments occurring in Latin and other Indo-European languages. However, the term is often used loosely as a cov ...
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Sound Law
A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic change) or a more general change to the speech sounds that exist (phonological change), such as the merger of two sounds or the creation of a new sound. A sound change can eliminate the affected sound, or a new sound can be added. Sound changes can be environmentally conditioned if the change occurs in only some sound environments, and not others. The term "sound change" refers to diachronic changes, which occur in a language's sound system. On the other hand, " alternation" refers to changes that happen synchronically (within the language of an individual speaker, depending on the neighbouring sounds) and do not change the language's underlying system (for example, the ''-s'' in the English plural can be pronounced differently depending on ...
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Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books by decree in 1586, it is the second oldest university press after Cambridge University Press. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics known as the Delegates of the Press, who are appointed by the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford. The Delegates of the Press are led by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as OUP's chief executive and as its major representative on other university bodies. Oxford University Press has had a similar governance structure since the 17th century. The press is located on Walton Street, Oxford, opposite Somerville College, in the inner suburb of Jericho. For the last 500 years, OUP has primarily focused on the publication of pedagogical texts and ...
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Stang's Law
Stang's law is a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) phonological rule named after the Norwegian linguist Christian Stang. Overview The law governs the word-final sequences of a vowel, followed by a semivowel ( or ) or a laryngeal ( or ), followed by a nasal. According to the law these sequences are simplified such that laryngeals and semivowels are dropped, with compensatory lengthening of a preceding vowel. This rule is usually cited in more restricted form as: and ( denoting a vowel and a long vowel). Often the rules and also are added: * PIE 'sky' (accusative singular) > > Sanskrit ''dyā́m'', acc. sg. of ''dyaús'', Latin ''diem'' (which served as the basis for Latin ''diēs'' 'day'), Greek Ζῆν (''Zên'') (reformed after Homeric Greek to Ζῆνα ''Zêna'', subsequently Δία ''Día''), acc. of Ζεύς (''Zeús'') * PIE 'cow' (acc. sg.) > > Sanskrit ''gā́m'', acc. sg. of ''gaús'', Greek (Homeric and dialectal) βών (''bṓn''), acc. sg. of βοῦς (''boûs' ...
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Szemerényi's Law
Szemerényi's law (or Szemerényi's lengthening) is both a sound change and a synchronic phonological rule that operated during an early stage of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). Though its effects are evident in many reconstructed as well as attested forms, it did not operate in late PIE, having become morphologized (with exceptions reconstructible via the comparative method). It is named for Hungarian linguist Oswald Szemerényi. Overview The rule deleted coda fricatives *s or laryngeals *h₁, *h₂ or *h₃ (cover symbol *H), with compensatory lengthening Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda, or of a vowel in an adjacent syllable. Lengthening triggered b ... occurring in a word-final position after resonants. In other words: : */-VRs/, */-VRH/ > *-VːR : */-VRH-/ > *-VR- (no examples of ''s''-deletion can be reconstructe ...
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Rick Derksen
Rick Derksen (born 1964) is a Dutch linguist and Indo-Europeanist at the University of Leiden. He is specialist in Balto-Slavic historical linguistics with an emphasis on accentology and etymology. He's a contributor to Leiden-based Indo-European Etymological Dictionary project, for which he wrote the ''Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon '' (Brill, 2008) and the ''Etymological Dictionary of the Baltic Inherited Lexicon'' (Brill, 2015). Derksen's law Overview According to the law, the forms with the suffixes ''*-to-'', ''*-sto-'', ''*-tlo-'' had the Balto-Slavic final accent. Namely, in the ''Proto-Lithuanian'' language, the accent was retracted from short vowels to the previous syllable, as a result of which the accent appeared on the syllable with an unstressed acute transformed into circumflex. Examples * Proto-Indo-European ''*bʰuHtlóm'' → Proto-Balto-Slavic ''*būˀtlá'' → Proto-Lithuanian ''*būtlás'' → (Derksen's law) Lithuanian ''bū̃k ...
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Frederik Kortlandt
Frederik Herman Henri (Frits) Kortlandt (born 19 June 1946) is a Dutch former professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He writes on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in general, and Proto-Indo-European, though he has also published studies of languages in other language families. He has also studied ways to associate language families into super-groups such as controversial Indo-Uralic. Biography Kortlandt was born on 19 June 1946 in Utrecht. Kortlandt, along with George van Driem and a few other colleagues, is one of the proponents of the Leiden School of linguistics, which describes language in terms of a meme or benign parasite. Kortlandt holds five degrees from the University of Amsterdam: * B.A., 1967, Slavic Linguistics and Literature * B.A., 1967, mathematics and economics * M.A., 1969, Slavic linguistics * M.A., 1970, mathematical economics * Ph.D., 1972, mathematical linguistics He obtained his ...
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Liquid Metathesis
The Slavic liquid metathesis refers to the phenomenon of metathesis of liquid consonants in the Common Slavic period in the South Slavic and West Slavic area. The closely related corresponding phenomenon of pleophony (also known as polnoglasie or full vocalization) occurred in parallel, in the East Slavic languages. The change acted on syllables in which the Proto-Slavic liquid consonants *''r'' and *''l'' occurred in a coda position. The result of the change is dependent upon the phonological environment and accents, and it varies in different Slavic languages. The change has been dated to the second half of the 8th century, before any Slavic languages were recorded in writing. Therefore, the change itself cannot be observed, but it can be inferred by comparing words in different Slavic languages. Evidence of the earlier state of affairs is also preserved in loanwords into and from Early Slavic as well as in cognates in other Indo-European languages, particularly Baltic langu ...
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Proto-Balto-Slavic Language
Proto-Balto-Slavic (PBS or PBSl) is a reconstructed hypothetical proto-language descending from Proto-Indo-European (PIE). From Proto-Balto-Slavic, the later Balto-Slavic languages are thought to have developed, composed of sub-branches Baltic languages, Baltic and Slavic languages, Slavic, and including modern Lithuanian language, Lithuanian, Polish language, Polish, Russian language, Russian and Serbo-Croatian language, Serbo-Croatian, among others. Like most other proto-languages, it is not attested by any surviving texts but has been reconstructed using the comparative method. There are several isoglosses that Baltic and Slavic languages share in phonology, morphology (linguistics), morphology and accentology, which represent common innovations from Proto-Indo-European times and can be chronologically arranged. Phonology Consonants Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops lost their aspiration in Proto-Balto-Slavic. Stops were no longer distinguished between fortis and a ...
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Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition. Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), six or seven noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and vocative), five declensions, four verb conjuga ...
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Proto-Indo-European Language
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 steppe of ...
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Ζεύς
Zeus or , , ; grc, Δῐός, ''Diós'', label=genitive Boeotian Aeolic and Laconian grc-dor, Δεύς, Deús ; grc, Δέος, ''Déos'', label=genitive el, Δίας, ''Días'' () is the sky and thunder god in ancient Greek religion, who rules as king of the gods on Mount Olympus. His name is cognate with the first element of his Roman equivalent Jupiter.''Larousse Desk Reference Encyclopedia'', The Book People, Haydock, 1995, p. 215. His mythology and powers are similar, though not identical, to those of Indo-European deities such as Jupiter, Perkūnas, Perun, Indra, Dyaus, and Zojz. Entry: "Dyaus" Zeus is the child of Cronus and Rhea, the youngest of his siblings to be born, though sometimes reckoned the eldest as the others required disgorging from Cronus's stomach. In most traditions, he is married to Hera, by whom he is usually said to have fathered Ares, Eileithyia, Hebe, and Hephaestus. At the oracle of Dodona, his consort was said to be Dione, by whom the ...
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Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic period (), and the Classical period (). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language. From the Hellenistic period (), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek, which is regarded as a separate historical stage, although its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek. There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek, of which Attic Greek developed into Koine. Dia ...
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