The Reconstruction of the Vocabulary of Material Culture and the Time Depth of a Language Family (Military Terminology in the Proto-Indo-European Language and Its Subclades)
[Rekonstruktsiia leksiki material’noi kul’tury i istoricheskaia glubina sem’i yazykov (voennaia leksika v praindoevropeiskom yazyke i dochernikh gruppakh)]
Type of publication: Research Article
Submitted: 08.05.2021
Accepted: 21.05.2021
About author(s)
Anna Dybo | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6077-7183 | adybo@mail.ru | Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences (1 bld. 1 Bolshoy Kislovsky Lane, Moscow, 125009, Russia)
Keywords
vocabulary of material culture; semantic reconstruction; military terminology; Indo-European languages
Abstract
The article explicates some methodological principles that should be observed when working with the reconstruction of semantic tokens to the proto-linguistic level, and criticizes the insufficiently clear observance of them in the version of the Afrasian lexical reconstruction proposed in Alexander Militarev’s article on the “Lexical Reconstruction for the Reconstruction of the Prehistory: ProtoAfrasian Terms Related to Weaponry, Warfare and Other Armed Conflicts”. I offer a reconstruction of the vocabulary presumably related to war and weapons in the Proto-Indo-European language and its early subclades (a time depth of at least 3.5 thousand years from the present time), and make a quantitative assessment of the Proto-Indo-European “lexicon of war” in comparison with the supposed Proto-Afrasian one.
Funding Information
This research was supported by the following institutions and grants:
Russian Science Foundation, https://doi.org/10.13039/501100006769 [grant no. 20-18-00159]
Citation
Dybo, А.V. 2021. The Reconstruction of the Vocabulary of Material Culture and the Time Depth of a Language Family (Military Terminology in the Proto-Indo-European Language and Its Subclades) [Rekonstruktsiia leksiki material’noi kul’tury i istoricheskaia glubina sem’i yazykov (voennaia leksika v praindoevropeiskom yazyke i dochernikh gruppakh)]. Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 4: 50–62. https://doi.org/10.31857/S023620070016698-4
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