This is the first etymological dictionary of Proto-Celtic to be published after a hundred years, synthesizing the work of several generations of Celtic scholars. It contains a reconstructed lexicon of Proto-Celtic with ca. 1500 entries. The principal lemmata are alphabetically arranged words reconstructed for Proto-Celtic. Each lemma contains the reflexes of the Proto-Celtic words in the individual Celtic languages, the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots from which they developed, as well as the cognate forms from other Indo-European languages.
Originally she graduated in physics and chemistry, but her interest soon led her to languages. Native in Hungarian, she was able to interpret fluently in nine or ten languages (in four of them even without preparation), and she translated technical literature and read belles-lettres in six languages. She was able to understand journalism in further eleven languages. As she put it, altogether she earned money with sixteen languages (Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Ukrainian).
Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable (Studies in the Evolution of Language)
This book presents a challenge to the widely-held assumption that human languages are both similar and constant in their degree of complexity. For a hundred years or more the universal equality of languages has been a tenet of faith among most anthropologists and linguists. It has been frequently advanced as a corrective to the idea that some languages are at a later stage of evolution than others.
A pioneer in the theoretical study of third language acquisition and interlanguage transfer, Ingrid Leung presents a series of original studies from diverse theoretical perspectives, ranging from typology to Universal Grammar and multicompetence. Featuring interesting three-way interactions between European and Asian languages, the studies offer an intriguing taste of the findings beginning to emerge in this rapidly developing field.
This is the first comprehensive treatment of the strategies employed in the world's languages to express predicative possession, as in nullthe boy has a batnull. It presents the results of the author's fifteen-year research project on the subject. Predicative possession is the source of many grammaticalization paths - as in the English perfect tense formed from to have - and its typology is an important key to understanding the structural variety of the world's languages and how they change.