Category: Basics

Old South Arabian (OSA) is a group of four closely related extinct Semitic languages: These languages were spoken in the southernmost part of the Arabian Peninsula. The earliest preserved records belonging to the group are dated to the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. OSA were written in the Ancient South Arabian script (also known…

“Atlantic-Semitic languages” is the name of a hypothetical language group prominently postulated by the German linguist Theo Vennemann . According to this hypothesis, Germanic and Celtic languages ​​reflect influences from Afro-Asiatic languages , particularly Semitic languages , so that very early language contact can be assumed. Vennemann assumes the existence of an influencing language, which…

Toponyms and geography are also closely interlinked. In many cases, place-names can be seen to be the spoken expression of Man’s view of the surrounding landscape.

“Pre-Greek” refers to the languages spoken in Greece before the arrival of Greek-speakers.

Semitic and Indo-European languages are generally considered two distinct language families. However, they share a large number of cognate words, which sometimes leads to debate about a potential, very distant, common origin. Indo-European: Greek, Latin, Romance languages, Germanic, Celtic, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, among others. Semitic languages: Akkadian, Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Ge’ez, Mandaic, Old-South-Arabian, Phoenician, Syriac, Tigre, Tigrinya,…

“Swadesh list” is a compilation of basic vocabulary items used in historical linguistics to compare languages and their relatedness.This list was originally compiled to focus on the core vocabulary, the items most likely to persist in a language over the millennia.Swadesh collection of words was also intended to avoid borrowing, based on the idea that…

Toponymy has traditionally been understood as a part of linguistics, but historians and archaeologists have been interested in it, as well.

Many toponyms are composed of ‘SPECIFIC’ and ‘GENERIC’ elements (or forms).

There are identifiable processes which occur over time to place names, and which alter the place names in such a way that their original meanings are lost.

A common question about toponyms concerns their origin. We can identify at least five common sources for toponyms.