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Description:
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Like Carl Darling Buck's "Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin" (1933),
this book is an explanation of the similarities and differences between
Greek and Latin morphology and lexicon through an account of their
prehistory. It also aims to discuss the principal features of Indo-European
linguistics. Greek and Latin are studied as a pair for cultural reasons
only; as languages, they have little in common apart from their
Indo-European heritage. Thus the only way to treat the historical bases for
their development is to begin with Proto-Indo-European. The only way to
make a reconstructed language like Proto-Indo-European intelligible and
intellectually defensible is to present at least some of the basis for
reconstructing its features and, in the process, to discuss reasoning and
methodology of reconstruction (including a weighing of alternative
reconstructions). The result is a compendious handbook of Indo-European
phonology and morphology, and a vade mecum of Indo-European
linguistics--the focus always remaining on Greek and Latin. The
non-classical sources for historical discussion are mainly Vedic Sanskrit,
Hittite, and Germanic, with occasional but crucial contributions from Old
Irish, Avestan, Baltic, and Slavic.
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