Historical linguistics (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ronald Lippi.

This is an abstract from the "The Barbacoan World: Recognizing and Preserving the Unique Indigenous Cultural Developments of the Northern Andes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Yumbos, Barbacoan peoples of the western flank of the Andes in northern Ecuador’s Pichincha province, have been the principal object of my studies for the past four decades. I draw upon archaeological research by myself and my team (especially including Alejandra...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rasmus Bjørn.

This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Loanword analysis is a unique contribution of historical linguistics to our understanding of prehistoric cultural interfaces. As language reflects the lives of its speakers, the substantiation of loanwords draws on the composite evidence from linguistic as well as archaeology and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sérgio Meira.

The Cariban language family, with between 25 and 40 languages (depending on one's criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects, and on the quality of older sources for extinct languages), is one of the most important language families in South America, together with Tupian, Arawak, and Macro-Ge. Although much descriptive work remains to be done, there are now sufficiently many good descriptions of Cariban languages to warrant good lexical comparative work, going well beyond Girard's 1971...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Kim. Tatyana Savenkova. Svetlana Smushko. Yevgenia Reis. David Reich.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The relevance of ancient DNA to debates in language prehistory is a noteworthy strand in Eurasian archaeogenetic research, where much effort has gone towards relating these data to Indo-European. We relate new genome-wide ancient DNA data from a historical Siberian individual to Yeniseian, an enigmatic and isolated language "microfamily" at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Birchall.

A central concept in historical linguistics is that of the sprachbund, or linguistic area, where languages of different families show shared structural traits as a result of long-term social interaction rather than shared inheritance. Through language contact phenomena such as bilingualism, calquing, the formation of trade languages, etc., this process of linguistic diffusion and convergence sometimes flies under the scientific radar, especially in regions such as Amazonia where there tend to be...