David J Leonardi

Studies at The Frontier of Historical Linguistics David J Leonardi

This book is intended as a supplemental guide to accompany standard course books in Historical Linguistics, and is also intended to offer new insights in a variety of specializations within this field. Two chapters offers a more scientific analysis of the issue of chance coincidences and offers support for the multilateral mass comparative method in this field. This work also aims to resolve a long standing debate between rival perspectives on the general nature of the histories of languages. Often linguists reject proposals of wide ranging language relationships proposed to be "genetically related". It is found that there is historically actually a complex web of language relationships due to both language contact and diffusion, which is believed to account for many world cognates, but also that that data partly does result from "genetic inheritance", which is to say from a proto-language or parent language dividing up into "offspring" languages, typically called "daughter languages". Also covered are types of word derivations, studies in the Chadic languages, a proposal of paradigmatic evidence for the original derivational morphology of Ancient Hebrew, and a progress report on Egyptian hieroglyphic decipherment.