Historical & Comparative Linguistics

How many languages are there? What differentiates one language from another? Are new languages still being discovered? Why are so many languages di...

This book presents a comprehensive account of features of Latin that emerge from dialogue: commands and requests, command softeners and strengthene...

This practical introduction to word history investigates every aspect of where words come from and how they change. Philip Durkin, chief etymologis...

This volume brings together current research in theoretical syntax and its interfaces in the Polynesian language family, with chapters focusing on ...

This book is a compilation of original poems (almost all in English) with their translations by Colin Sydenham into diverse Latin metres. In presen...

This book is intended as a Festschrift to honour the work of David Banks, Emeritus Professor of the Universite de Bretagne Occidentale, France. The...

In 2000, two linguistic endangerment experts, Nettle and Romaine, estimated that among the worlds 6000 languages, only about 600 could be considere...

What is the origin of the Romance languages and how did they evolve? When and how did they become different from Latin, and from each other? Volume...

How can we unravel the evolution of language, given that there is no direct evidence about it? Rudolf Botha addresses this intriguing question in h...

Slang, however one judges it, shows us at our most human. It is used widely and often, typically associated with the writers of noir fiction, teena...

How can we unravel the evolution of language, given that there is no direct evidence about it? Rudolf Botha addresses this intriguing question in h...

Even before the Helsinki Corpus was published, Spain had a good amount of Historical English researchers, such as the group directed by Teresa Fane...

The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages is the most exhaustive treatment of the Romance languages available today. Leading international scholars...

This introduction to Medieval Spanish, or Old Spanish, closes a long-standing gap in the literature. Focusing on the internal history of the Spanis...

Warren Maguire examines Mid-Ulster English as a key case of new dialect formation, considering the roles of language shift and dialect contact in i...

'Quite simply, and quite ridiculously, one of the funniest and most illuminating books I have ever read. I thought I was obsessive, but Keith Kahn-...

A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 A Globe & Mail Book of the Year A stimulating work on the politics of language. LA Review of Books As globalisa...

What could Greek poets or Roman historians say in their own language that would be lost in translation? After all, different languages have differe...

This pack contains everything you need to learn the original language of the Old Testament, no matter if you are already enrolled in a class or lea...

A Dictionary of Varieties of English presents a comprehensive listing of the distinctive dialects and forms of English spoken throughout the contem...

Most of us know of the Indo-European roots of European languages, but how did this precursor language take hold and what did Europe look like befor...

The ideal gift for anyone interested in language, geography and people. We communicate through the spoken and written word and language h...

Languages change and they keep changing as a result of communicative interactions and practices in the context of communities of language users. Th...

This volume offers a coherent and detailed picture of the diachronic development of verbal categories of Old English, Old High German, and other Ge...

The studies in Language Change in Contact Languages showcase the contributions that the study of contact language varieties make to the understandi...

From late antiquity through to the early middle ages, people across north-western Europe were inscribing runes on a range of different objects. Onc...

This textbook serves a dual purpose. It is, first, a comprehensive introduction to historical linguistics, intended for both undergraduate and grad...

This volume brings together ten contributions by leading experts who present their current usage-based research in Diachronic Construction Grammar....

This book presents a new and innovative theory on the origin of the Germanic languages. This theory presents solutions to four pivotal problems in ...

This volume brings together ten peer-reviewed articles on Arabic linguistics. The articles are distributed over three parts: phonetics and phonolog...

While much of the literature has focused on explaining diachronic variation and change, the fact that sometimes change does not seem to happen has ...