about

Indo-European Linguistics has produced a wealth of knowledge about the grammars of Ancient Indo-European languages, which has substantially advanced our understanding of the history of language and the human past in general. Since this knowledge is scattered over thousands of scientific publications of the past two centuries (and ongoing), access to these languages and their fascinating features and histories is reserved to specialists. The aim of this project is to help unearth this treasure and to present it to a wider audience in an easily accessible and up-to-date form. In line with this vision, a team of experts on Indo-European languages from all over the world offers courses introducing twelve of the most important Indo-European languages and their grammars.

All lectures have a parallel design:

• introduction

  language and speakers, writing, sources

• sounds

  phonemes, syllables, feet, prosodic words, phonological phrases, intonational phrases

• words

  morphological type, stem formation, inflection

• structures

  nominal structures, adpositional structures, predication, clause

• texts

  sample texts with linguistic discussion (available in some languages)

The lectures took place between October 2018 and February 2020 at the University of Göttingen. They were recorded by Ralf Köster and his team at the University and State Library Video Studio. This production is part of the project Ancient Indo-European Languages for the 21st Century, funded by the programme "Internationalization of Curricula" at the University of Göttingen and the Linguistics Department (Sprachwissenschaftliches Seminar) at Göttingen.

This online resource was first launched in November 2020, while digital communication was the only means for communicating scientifc results. We were looking forward to the day after, hoping that this resource will be a welcome complement of uncontaminated grammar books and touchable grammarians.

The project team

glottothèque

people