This book presents the theory that the linguistic and cultural landscape of Europe north of the Alps and the Pyrenees was shaped in prehistoric times by the interaction of Indo-European speakers with speakers of languages related to Basque and to Semitic. These influences on the lexicon, grammar, and toponymy of the West Indo-European languages (with special focus on Germanic) are demonstrated in German and English research papers, provided here with summaries, commentaries, and a new introduction in English, and with general and etymological indexes.

This book presents the most comprehensive coverage of the field of Indo-European Linguistics in a century, focusing on the entire Indo-European family and treating each major branch and most minor languages. The collaborative work of 120 scholars from 22 countries, Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics combines the exhaustive coverage of an encyclopedia with the in-depth treatment of individual monographic studies.

The World's Major Languages features over 50 of the world's languages and language families. This revised edition includes updated bibliographies for each chapter and up-to-date census figures. The featured languages have been chosen based on the number of speakers, their role as official languages and their cultural and historical importance. Each language is looked at in depth, and the chapters provide information on both grammatical features and on salient features of the language's history and cultural role. The World’s Major Languages is an accessible and essential reference work for linguists.

Germania Semitica explores prehistoric language contact in general, and attempts to identify the languages involved in shaping Germanic in particular. The book deals with a topic outside the scope of other disciplines concerned with prehistory, such as archaeology and genetics, drawing its conclusions from the linguistic evidence alone, relying on language typology and areal probability. The data for reconstruction comes from Germanic syntax, phonology, etymology, religious loan names, and the writing system, more precisely from word order, syntactic constructions, word formation, irregularities in phonological form, lexical peculiarities, and the structure and rules of the Germanic runic alphabet. It is demonstrated that common descent is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for reconstruction. Instead, lexical and structural parallels between Germanic and Semitic languages are explored and interpreted in the framework of modern language contact theory.

This book consisting of 21 articles is the result of three different symposia held in Zadar (2013), Moscow (2014) and Strasbourg (2016) with focus on two major topics: Glottogenesis and Conflicts in Europe and Safeguarding and protection of European lesser-used languages as formulated in the 1992 EU-Charter. PART I: Univ. of Zadar GLOTTOGENESIS ON THE EUROPEAN CONTINENT: General Introduction (Ureland), Hamel: From the Ice Age to modern languages SOUTHERN EUROPE: Genesis of French (Schmitt), Italian (Agresti, Begioni) and Spanish (Lüdtke) SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE: Genesis of Croatian (Socanac, Granic, Skelin Horvat/Simicic; Skevin/Markovic; Bulgarian (Choparinova) EASTERN EUROPE: Genesis of Russian (Oleinichenko, Iamshanova) CENTRAL EUROPE: Genesis of Germanic (Krasukhin) WESTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE: Genesis of (Celtic): (Broderick) NORTHERN EUROPE: Genesis of North Sámi (Weinstock) PART II: Linguistic Institute of the Academy of Sciences Moscow Introduction (Ureland); Report on the Moscow Round Table (De Geer); The LSJ-Project (Steller) PART III: René Schickele-Gesellschaft and Council of Europe, Strasbourg Introduction (Ureland); Kalmyk (Bitkeeva); Latin (Merolle); Colloquium in Strasbourg (Woehrling)

This book presents a new and innovative theory on the origin of the Germanic languages. This theory presents solutions to four pivotal problems in the history of Germanic with critical implications for cultural history: the origin of the Germanic writing system (the Runic alphabet), the genesis of the Germanic strong verbs, the development of the Germanic word order, and etymologies for key elements of the Germanic lexicon. The book proposes that all four problems can be solved if it is hypothesized that over 2,000 years ago the ancestor of all Germanic languages, Proto-Germanic, was in intensive contact with Punic, a Semitic language from the Mediterranean. This scenario is explored by focusing on linguistic data, supported by an interdisciplinary mosaic of evidence. This book is of interest to anyone working on the linguistic and cultural history of the Germanic languages.