A hands-on approach to historical linguistics, working through 101 problems in five different categories This workbook guides students through 12 problems on the establishment of genetic relationship among languages, 24 problems on sound change, 35 problems on phonological reconstruction, 10 problems on internal reconstruction, and 20 problems on subgrouping. Each section begins with an introduction to the principles of historical linguistics as applied to the topic in hand. The problems come next, ordered by level of difficulty beginning, intermediate, advanced. The 'Solutions' section at...

This book documents an understudied phenomenon in Austronesian languages, namely the existence of recurrent submorphemic sound-meaning associations of the general form -CVC.

It fills a critical gap in scholarship on these languages by bringing together a large body of data in one place, and by discussing some of the theoretical issues that arise in analyzing this data. Following an introduction which presents the topic, it includes a critical review of the relevant literature over the past century, and discussions of the following: 1. problems in finding the root (the...

Modernization and conversion to world religions are threatening the survival of traditional belief systems, leaving behind only mysterious traces of their existence. This book, based upon extensive research conducted over a period of nearly four decades, brings scientific rigor to one of the questions that have always attracted human curiosity: that of the origin of the dragon.
The author demonstrates that both dragons and rainbows are cultural universals, that many of the traits that are attributed to dragons in widely separated parts of the planet are also attributed to rainbows, and...