Guest
In this lecture, we will examine the ways in which historical linguists classify languages, study their particular history, and trace relationships of sound and sense. Our focus is on the Indo-European languages, and we will look closely at one of the most important relationships of sound among them: Grimm’s Law. This set of relationships helps us understand the ways in which words from different modern European languages are related. It also helps scholars reconstruct the older forms of those words and, in the process, recover something of the history, culture, and social life of the Indo-European peoples. In this and the following lecture, we explore the world of the Indo-European peoples as revealed through these techniques of reconstruction.
