Author: Raimo Anttila
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027237077
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
This study resurrects the genre of Wortstudien contributions or lexilogus treatments, the core of historical lexical semantics. Such studies used to be quite popular, and interest in lexical matters is again rising. The word family around the Indo-European root "*ag?-" drive is placed against its Germanic replacement "drive" as a typological parallel. Many long-standing problems can now be solved, and new hypotheses emerge. Starting with the still important sports and games aspect of social life, new morphology is resurrected ("ag??n" games as an original plural; 2), and a strongly social meaning for good ("agathos"; 3). "Aganos" finds its solution that combines the mild and plant readings in a natural way ( 4). Hunting-and-gathering considerations establish new possibilities or certainties for some wealth words ( 6), and all around religion is involved ( 7). Comparable Baltic Finnic evidence is drawn in ( 8), and such evidence is used to discuss cases on both sides. This way explanations for the Indo-European material are strengthened, or even made possible in the first place, and scores of Baltic Finnic words find attractive (driving) loan hypotheses as their etymologies.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004508821
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
This volume contains a new and up-to date selection of case studies which offer new insights on various topics in Indo-European linguistics, with a focus on contact, variation, and reconstruction, and with methods that straddle the divide between Linguistics and Philology.
Author: Michael A. Rinella
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1461634016
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
Pharmakon: Plato, Drug Culture, and Identity in Ancient Athens examines the emerging concern for controlling states of psychological ecstasy in the history of western thought, focusing on ancient Greece (c. 750-146 BCE), particularly the Classical Period (c. 500-336 BCE) and especially the dialogues of the Athenian philosopher Plato (427-347 BCE). Employing a diverse array of materials ranging from literature, philosophy, medicine, botany, pharmacology, religion, magic, and law, Pharmakon fundamentally reframes the conceptual context of how we read and interpret Plato's dialogues. Michael A. Rinella demonstrates how the power and truth claims of philosophy, repeatedly likened to a pharmakon, opposes itself to the cultural authority of a host of other occupations in ancient Greek society who derived their powers from, or likened their authority to, some pharmakon. These included Dionysian and Eleusinian religion, physicians and other healers, magicians and other magic workers, poets, sophists, rhetoricians, as well as others. Accessible to the general reader, yet challenging to the specialist, Pharmakon is a comprehensive examination of the place of drugs in ancient thought that will compel the reader to understand Plato in a new way.
Author: Nikoletta Kanavou
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110421976
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
The purpose of this book is to contribute to the appreciation of the linguistic, literary and contextual value of Homeric personal names. This is an old topic, which famously interested Plato, and an object of constant scholarly attention from the time of ancient commentators to the present day. The book begins with an introduction to the particularly complex set of factors that affect all efforts to interpret Homeric names. The main chapters are structured around the character and action of selected heroes in their Homeric contexts (in the case of the Iliad, a heroic war; the Odyssey chapter encompasses more than one planes of action). They offer a survey of modern etymologies, set against ancient views on names and naming, in order to reconstruct (as far as possible) the reception of significant names by ancient audiences and further to shed light on the parameters surrounding the choice and use of personal names in Homer. An Appendix touches on the underexplored career of Homeric personal names as historical names, offering data and a preliminary analysis.
Author: Marjolyn Verspoor
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027236542
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 473
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Book Description
The basic tenet of cognitive linguistics is that every linguistic expression is a construal relation. The first section of this volume focuses on issues of such construal and presentation of information, including figure-ground relations, image-schematic structures, and the role of syntactic constructions in information structure.In sections two and three papers are presented on cross-categorial polysemy between lexical and grammatical uses of a morpheme, and between different grammatical senses, and on the relationship between earlier lexical senses and later grammatical ones.The final section of the volume brings together studies which shed further light on transitivity and argument structure. The study of transitivity necessarily entails exploration of the relationship between syntactic constructions and the pragmatics and semantics conveyed by such constructions.As a whole, this collection of papers gives new evidence on the complexity and motivation of the mapping between linguistic form and function and offers a wealth of new directions for research on the construction of meaning at every level of the sentence.
Author: Raimo Anttila
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027235562
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 491
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Book Description
In any course of historical and comparative linguistics there will be students of different language backgrounds, different levels of linguistic training, and different theoretical orientation. This textbook attempts to mitigate the problems raised by this heterogeneity in a number of ways. Since it is impossible to treat the language or language family of special interest to every student, the focus of this book is on English in particular and Indo-European languages in general, with Finnish and its closely related languages for contrast. The tenets of different schools of linguistics, and the controversies among them, are treated eclectically and objectively; the examination of language itself plays the leading role in our efforts to ascertain the comparative value of competing theories. This revised edition (1989) of a standard work for comparative linguists offers an added introduction dealing mainly with a semiotic basis of change, a final chapter on aspects of explanation, particularly in historical and human disciplines, and added sections on comparative syntax and on the semiotic status of the comparative method.
Author: Robert Beekes
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900427944X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
Before the arrival of the Indo-European Greeks in the area around the Aegean Sea, a non-Indo-European language was spoken there which was eventually replaced by Greek. Although no written texts exist in this Pre-Greek language, Robert Beekes shows that we can reconstruct elements of its phonology and morphology on the basis of the substantial amount of Pre-Greek vocabulary which was absorbed by Greek. In addition to the general characteristics of Pre-Greek, Beekes provides a complete overview of the evidence, comprising over 1100 Greek etyma which are certainly of Pre-Greek origin. The book thus opens a window on the first Pre-Indo-European language of prehistoric Europe to have left a trace in history.
Author: Laura Massetti
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004694137
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Pindar’s Pythian Twelve is the only choral lyric epinicion in our possession composed for the winner of a non-athletic competition. Often regarded as an ode of straightforward interpretation, close analysis of the text reveals that it presents several challenges to modern readers. This book offers an updated translation of the text and an investigation of the main interpretative issues of the epinicion with the aid of historical linguistics. By identifying devices which Pindar might have inherited from earlier periods of poetic language, the study provides insights into the thematic aspects of the ode as well as on Pindar’s compositional technique.
Author: Julie Coleman
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027237019
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Including a selection of papers originally presented at the 10th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, the contributions to this volume aim to show the breadth and depth of late-1990s studies in lexicology, semantics and lexicography.
Author: Martin Bernal
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 197880721X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1018
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Book Description
Winner of the 1990 American Book Award What is classical about Classical civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the foundation of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied or suppressed since the eighteenth century—chiefly for racist reasons. The popular view is that Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers—Aryans—from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this “Aryan model.” They did not see their institutions as original, but as derived from the East and from Egypt in particular. This long-awaited third and final volume of the series is concerned with the linguistic evidence that contradicts the Aryan Model of ancient Greece. Bernal shows how nearly 40 percent of the Greek vocabulary has been plausibly derived from two Afroasiatic languages – Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic. He also reveals how these derivations are not limited to matters of trade, but extended to the sophisticated language of politics, religion, and philosophy. This evidence, according to Bernal, greatly strengthens the hypothesis that in Greece an Indo-European-speaking population was culturally dominated by Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic speakers. Provocative, passionate, and colossal in scope, this volume caps a thoughtful rewriting of history that has been stirring academic and political controversy since the publication of the first volume.
