This book covers he phonological development from Proto-Indo-European to Attic Greek. It is a user-friendly and accessible resource in which all explanations are accompanied by exercises. The individual chapters cover separate developments so that the user can decide which chapter to study next. The book can be used for self-study or for university courses.
This book uses modern methods of adult education in the field of historical linguistics. It presents a variety of tasks, easy-to-understand exercises and work instructions as well as clear tables and precise descriptions of the development of the Attic language. Step by step the user is introduced deeper into the complicated developments of the Attic language. By applying the structures of language development over and over again the user learns the matter by doing it. The exercises, in which Attics word are deduced from their Indo-European pre-forms, are structured as puzzles that must be solved. The single-step method allows the user to analyze each derivation step exactly as a number always refers to an index of all the Greek sound laws which can be found at the end of the book.
In each teaching unit the left page contains the explanations and descriptions of Latin sound laws and the right page offers exercises to train the learning matter. Sound laws, which are explained in other units, are additionally given on the exercise pages. Answers to all the exercises are included in the book. The comprehensive index includes all Greek sound laws and is referred to in every step of a phonological derivation as well as in all the explanations. The index can be used for reference as well.
The structure of the book is intentionally identical to the "Latin Historical Phonology Workbook" which is also published in the Reichert Verlag. In this way, not only the parallelism of many developments can be compared with each other at first glance but the user can start working with the book directly without having to deal with any new types of tasks.
The book is suitable for use in university courses but can easily be used for self-study as well based on the existing solutions in the book. The language is plain, intelligible and presents complex developments in a simple way so that non-specialists can work with the book. Previous knowledge of Greek is not needed due to the introduction in which the Greek alphabet, the basics of phonology and a theoretical model of language development are presented.
Malte Liesner works as a Latin lecturer at the University of Bamberg and as a teacher of Business English and German in companies and educational institutions. He studied Indo-European languages, Indology and Computational Linguistics at the Universities of Cologne and Würzburg in Germany.
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