The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern WorldRoughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 41
... Meanings 32 Syntax and Morphology: The Shape of a Dead Language 36 Conclusion: Raising a Language from the Dead 38 Chapter Three Language and Time 1: The Last Speakers of Proto-Indo-European 39 The Size of the Chronological Window: How ...
... meanings of thousands of words from the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary—itself an astonishing feat. Those words can be analyzed to describe the thoughts, values, concerns, family relations, and religious beliefs of the people who spoke ...
... meaning to the world. Each particular language, therefore, generates and is enmeshed in a closed social community, or “folk,” that is at its core meaningless to an outsider. Language was seen by Herder and von Humboldt as a vessel that ...
... meanings. But because of other changes in how Latin was spoken, [ts-] began to be heard as a different sound, a phoneme distinct from [k-] that could change the meaning of a word. At that point people had to decide whether kentum was ...
... meaning. Learning these rules changes our awareness from that of an infant to a functioning member of the human tribe. Because language is central to human evolution, culture, and social identity, each member of the tribe is ...
Contents
The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes | 121 |
Authors Note on Radiocarbon Dates | 467 |
Notes | 471 |
507 | |
547 | |
Other editions - View all
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian ... David W. Anthony No preview available - 2007 |