Ex Anatolia lux · Ex Anatolia lux. The Linguistic Origins of Europe: Word-formation and Lexicon in Anatolian and Core Indo-European.

Ex Anatolia lux. The Linguistic Origins of Europe: Word-formation and Lexicon in Anatolian and Core Indo-European.

The project carries out a systematic study of word formation and vocabulary of the Anatolian languages, spoken in different phases from the 16th to the 2nd century BCE in the Asian part of Turkey and part of northern Syria. A proper understanding of Anatolian, allegedly the first branch to split off from the Indo-European language family, is crucial for a better understanding of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed language from which all Indo-European languages descend, spoken by more than half of the world's population and including modern languages like English, German, French, Hindi. A thorough historical-comparative investigation of the position of Anatolian is still a distinct desideratum within the IE studies, and therefore, this is the core aim of the project with the implication of innovative theoretical and methodological perspectives. It is generally agreed that, in relation to Core IE, the Anatolian languages show a series of differences in the productivity of several derivational suffixes and in the meaning of words and lexemes, even if their forms fully or partially match each other. These differences are of major relevance for any attempt to identify the position of Anatolian, i.e. of what we can reconstruct as Proto-Anatolian on the basis of the evidence from the attested Anatolian languages as compared to the other IE languages. Such a study contributes to the identification and reconstruction of our roots as inhabitants of Europe and part of Asia as well as descendants of the peoples who arrived in Eurasia approxamitely around the 4th millennium BCE bringing new languages and culture which developed and partly survived until today. The overall objectives of the project are three: a. to establish the relationship between the Anatolian languages of the second and first millennium BCE with respect to the common inherited as well as the innovative morphological and lexical material with the intention of covering the Proto-Anatolian state of affairs. b. to demonstrate how and to what extent a systematic classification and comparison of the word-formation and lexical development of Anatolian and the other IE languages respectively can enhance the understanding of the first phases of IE after the disintegration of PIE. c. to provide linguistic foundation for the archaeological results concerning the chronology of the last phase of PIE.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union