ERC Advanced Grant · 2023
Linguistic traces: low-frequency forms as evidence of language and population history
We know remarkably little about the early history that formed the known European languages and cultures. While advances in genetics have led to new debates about population histories, they cannot tell us about the languages spoken. In the absence of written records, language appears ephemeral: changes through time seemingly erase all traces of earlier speech, leaving only abstract ‘proto-languages’ to be reconstructed. Such erasures are not, however, complete, as language change always leaves behind a tail of residual forms. Very little research has dealt with the low-frequency variation that forms part of all natural language, even though it is known that residual forms are often resistant…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.