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  3. Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes
  • Cited by 9
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2010
Print publication year:
2009
First published in:
1879
Online ISBN:
9780511706141
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511706141
Subjects:
Phonetics and Phonology, English Language and Linguistics: General Interest, Historical Linguistics, Language and Linguistics
Series:
Cambridge Library Collection - Linguistics
Information

Book description

Written in 1878, while the author was a twenty-year-old student in Berlin, Saussure's only full-length work proposed the existence of two additional sonant coefficients in the Indo-European parent language. Applying the methods of comparison and internal reconstruction to Proto-Indo-European, Saussure argued that the long vowels had developed from a short vowel plus a sonant coefficient. A hypothesis far ahead of its time, his proposal was not confirmed until 1927 when a consonantal phoneme etymologically derived from Saussure's A was discovered in newly deciphered Hittite, the oldest attested Indo-European language. Not only is the Mémoire a dramatic demonstration of the method of internal reconstruction, but it also paved the way for further developments in historical phonology including laryngeal theory, and may have stimulated Saussure's later development of structuralism. This reissue includes, as an appendix, Antoine Meillet's 1913 obituary of Saussure.

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