u/Hippophlebotomist

“This dissertation serves as the first full comprehensive grammar of the Phrygian language, which was spoken in central Anatolia from the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE to the middle of the 1st millennium CE and is attested in a total of about 500 inscriptions. The language as attested is divided into two stages; Old Phrygian, which was written in a native alphabet, spans from the earliest Phrygian inscriptions to about 300 BCE, whereas New Phrygian, which was written in the Greek alphabet, encompasses about 120 inscriptions from the beginning of the first millennium CE. Previous scholarship has for the most part focused on interpreting Phrygian inscriptions, the lexicon of the language, or tackled individual issues of grammar; this work aims to produce a full synchronic and diachronic grammar of the language, focusing prominently on the dialectal position of Phrygian within the Indo-European group of languages.”

Abstract: Five millennia ago, nomadic people from the North Pontic steppe left a profound impact on the course of Eurasian prehistory. However, little is known about their mobility patterns within their home region. To address this knowledge gap, we conducted a survey of the strontium isotope landscape of people interred in the 4th-3rd millennium BCE burial mounds (kurgans) of the western part of the North Pontic steppe. By analyzing the strontium signature in human bone and dentin, we established strontium baseline values for the region. We subsequently correlated enamel strontium ratios from 25 selected individuals with the baseline obtained and with published strontium data across the North Pontic steppe. Enamel strontium ratios show that some individuals interred in the northwest North Pontic fall within the regional baseline range, whereas others overlap with values reported for the eastern North Pontic steppe. In conjunction with carbon (δ13C) and nitrogen (δ15N) stable isotope data, we further determined that some individuals interred in the western Pontic steppe either spent the later part of life in the west Caspian steppe or were affected by physiological stress during lifetime. By integrating our data with published isotopic datasets, we produced a first baseline heatmap of the North Pontic steppe for the c. 4450-2100 BCE chronological period.

“An increasing number of historical linguists now believe that the traditional reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European stop system (*T, *D, *Dh) is likely flawed. Yet, despite various proposed alternatives—ranging from systems featuring glottalised or non-plosive consonants to those based on length contrasts—no single theory has achieved broad consensus. This volume, comprising twenty chapters, brings together leading specialists who examine all relevant data, as well as comparative and typological arguments, to reassess the Proto-Indo-European stop inventory. It also offers the most up-to-date analyses of the evolution of the stop systems across the individual Indo-European branches.

Contributors are: Pascale Eskes, Alwin Kloekhorst, Martin Joachim Kümmel, Rianne van Lieburg, Orsat Ligorio, Alexander Lubotsky, Ranko Matasović, Brett Miller, Michaël Peyrot, Tijmen Pronk, Joseph Salmons, Ollie Sayeed, Peter Schrijver, Michiel de Vaan, and Bert Vaux.”