Book contents
- Millennia of Language Change
- Millennia of Language Change
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: the Long View
- 1 Prehistoric Sociolinguistics and the Uniformitarian Hypothesis: What Were Stone-Age Languages Like?
- 2 From Ancient Greek to Comanche: on Many Millennia of Complexification
- 3 First-Millennium England: a Tale of Two Copulas
- 4 The First Three Thousand Years: Contact in Prehistoric and Early Historic English
- 5 Verner’s Law, Germanic Dialects and the English Dialect ‘Default Singulars’
- 6 Deep into the Pacific: the Austronesian Migrations and the Linguistic Consequences of Isolation
- 7 The Hellenistic Koiné 320 bc to 550 ad and Its Medieval and Early Modern Congeners
- 8 Indo-European Feminines: Contact, Diffusion and Gender Loss around the North Sea
- Sources
- References
- Index
3 - First-Millennium England: a Tale of Two Copulas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2020
- Millennia of Language Change
- Millennia of Language Change
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: the Long View
- 1 Prehistoric Sociolinguistics and the Uniformitarian Hypothesis: What Were Stone-Age Languages Like?
- 2 From Ancient Greek to Comanche: on Many Millennia of Complexification
- 3 First-Millennium England: a Tale of Two Copulas
- 4 The First Three Thousand Years: Contact in Prehistoric and Early Historic English
- 5 Verner’s Law, Germanic Dialects and the English Dialect ‘Default Singulars’
- 6 Deep into the Pacific: the Austronesian Migrations and the Linguistic Consequences of Isolation
- 7 The Hellenistic Koiné 320 bc to 550 ad and Its Medieval and Early Modern Congeners
- 8 Indo-European Feminines: Contact, Diffusion and Gender Loss around the North Sea
- Sources
- References
- Index
Summary
The date of the arrival of Indo-European languages in Europe has not been established with any degree of certainty, and different scholars vary by some thousands of years in their estimates. According to Baldi and Page (2006), 4500 BC seems to be the earliest limit for the Indo-Europeanisation of Europe espoused by any historical linguist; and many other writers suppose that Indo-European-speaking migrants can first be associated with the archaeological Corded Ware culture which is not attested before around 3000 BC – and then only as far west as southern Poland (Mallory 1989). Baldi and Page (2006: 2194) further state that the ‘traditional view of the settlement of the Celts places them in the British Isles no earlier than about 2000 BC’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Millennia of Language ChangeSociolinguistic Studies in Deep Historical Linguistics, pp. 37 - 50Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020