Bøger af John D Bengtson

This book is the most comprehensive and detailed treatment of the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis, i.e., a proposal that the Basque language is most closely related to the North Caucasian language family. A more or less similar hypothesis was developed in the twentieth century by prominent scholars, including C.C. Uhlenbeck, Georges Dumézil, and René Lafon. The efforts of these savants, and others, while important, were rather sporadic and consisted of scattered articles, and they never developed a comprehensive phonological and morphological model of Euskaro-Caucasian. Their work on the hypothesis ceased with the death of the last of them, Dumézil, in 1986. On the other hand, thanks to advances in our understanding of Basque phonology and etymology (mainly by Luis Michelena [Koldo Mitxelena]), and in North Caucasian phonology and etymology (e.g., by Balkarov, Shagirov, Abdokov, Chirikba, Nikolaev & Starostin), and improved linguistic methods, it has become possible for the author to develop a comprehensive Euskaro-Caucasian phonological structure, including regular sound correspondences of vowels and consonants supported by significant numbers of etymologies. These correspondences, in turn, allowed the author to evaluate objectively the etymological proposals of earlier investigators (which led to the modification or outright rejection of many of them), and also provided clues to discovering some original etymologies. The nucleus of the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis is "old," beginning in the nineteenth century, but the "new paradigm" alluded to in the provisional title refers to (a) a focus on the North Caucasian language family as the closest surviving relative of Basque (as opposed to the "South Caucasian" = Kartvelian family), (b) a new and comprehensive scheme of comparative phonology, (c) new discoveries in comparative morphology, and (d) several hundred lexical and grammatical etymologies that supersede the more haphazard comparisons offered in earlier works. "John Bengtson is one of the brilliant linguists of our time." [Igor M. Diakonoff, Oriental Institute, St. Retersburg, Russia. 1999.

Thank you for checking out this book by Theophania Publishing. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you soon. We have thousands of titles available, and we invite you to search for us by name, contact us via our website, or download our most recent catalogues. The articles in this book represent a large part of Mr. Bengtson's work in historical linguistics and paleolinguistics over the past few years. The first two articles concern the worldwide picture of a human language family: global etymologies. The third is a brief summary of Mr. Bengtson's current view of the Austric macrofamily. The next six articles are concerned with the so called "isolates," Basque and Burushaski, and Mr. Bengtson's view that they are just members of a larger macrofamily, Dene-Caucasian. The two essays with titles beginning "The Problem of 'Isolates'..." approach the issues in a narrative, minimally technical style, while the other four papers are more detail-oriented and technical. The last two articles concentrate on the Na-Dene family, which Mr. Bengtson's considers an integral part of Dene-Caucasian. It hardly needs saying that much of the content of this book is out of the mainstream of historical linguistic work.

A comprehensive examination of the proposal that Basque is most closely related to the North Caucasian language family.