Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!bb3.andrew.cmu.edu!nntp.sei.cmu.edu!news.cis.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!news.sprintlink.net!news-stk-200.sprintlink.net!news2.noc.netcom.net!noc.netcom.net!netcom.com!netcom14!alderson
From: alderson@netcom14.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Greek
In-Reply-To: sah@mscsv1.dl.ac.uk's message of 26 Jun 1996 11:00:58 GMT
Message-ID: <ALDERSON.96Jun27113410@netcom14.netcom.com>
Sender: alderson@netcom14.netcom.com
Reply-To: alderson@netcom.com
Organization: NETCOM On-line services
References: <SAH.96Jun26120058@mscsv1.dl.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 18:34:10 GMT
Lines: 34

Posted and e-mailed:

In article <SAH.96Jun26120058@mscsv1.dl.ac.uk> sah@mscsv1.dl.ac.uk
(S.A.T. Haldane) writes:

>I'm looking for a book on the development of Greek from Indo-European. I'm
>particularly interested in the periods when Linear A and Linear B were used as
>writing systems. I'm also interested in the relationships between Greek and
>other members of the same branch of the Indo-European family. Do Albanian and
>Armenian fall into this category?

I would recommend Palmer's _The Greek Language_; his style is very easy to read
but he keeps the facts undiluted.  If you have more background in linguistics,
Buck's _Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin_ or Sihler's _New Comparative
Grammar of Greek and Latin_ will stand you in good stead.

Linear A is not known to have been used to write Greek.  Even asuming the Greek
values for the symbols shared between Linear B and Linear A yields no Greek
readings.

Armenian and Albanian each make up individual branches of the Indo-European
family, as does Greek.

Greek, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, and Balto-Slavic appear to have belonged to a
central innovating group within Indo-European, since they share a number of
developments which are not present in the other members of the family (Italic,
Germanic, Albanian, Celtic, Tocharian, and Anatolian), but note that Germanic
and Balto-Slavic share innovations that none of the others have, as well, so
that this is not a simple tree-branching set of relationships.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
