This book covers the phonological development from Proto-Indo-European to Sanskrit. 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.
Sanskrit is the old language of India and the origin of words like yoga, mantra, ayurveda, karma und tantra. This book traces the undocumented prehistory of Sanskrit back to Proto-Indo-European. 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 Sanskrit language. By applying the structures of language development over and over again the user learns the matter by doing it. The exercises, in which Sanskrit word are deduced from their Proto-Indo-European pre-forms, are designed as puzzles that must be solved. The single-step method allows the user to analyze each derivation step exactly because a number always refers to an index of all the Sanskrit 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 Sanskrit 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 Sanskrit 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" and “Greek Historical Phonology Workbook” which are 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 Sanskrit is not required.
Malte Liesner studied Indo-European languages, Indology and Computational Linguistics at the Universities of Cologne and Würzburg in Germany. He works as a German and English teacher in Bamberg. His main interest in the external connection of Indo-European languages with other language phyla of the earth.
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