This chapter reviews the existing Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) work on diachronic syntax and morphosyntax and shows how the tools of language description developed by RRG can also be used to account for several aspects of language change. Drawing evidence from developments which have occurred in a wide range of languages, it is argued that RRG allows for a more fine-grained analysis of diachronic processes than theoretically neutral approaches, that it answers fundamental questions about the nature and causes of syntactic change, and that it is not a mere tool of linguistic description, but a theory that makes falsifiable empirical predictions.

The relationship between landscape and place names is very strong. In ancient times, places were named after natural resources and the landscape’s hydro-geo-morphological features. This trend persists today in some contexts. For instance, Abui place names on Alor Island are named after important landscape features, agricultural and horticultural crops, and useful plants. Abui toponyms are compounded with lexemes describing human settlements and highlighting the close relationship between nature and man. This chapters shows how the analysis of the landscape and related disciplines, like landscape archaeology (the study of the past use of the landscape determined by archaeological findings), enable scholars to reconstruct the remote origins of toponyms both in Indo-European and non-Indo-European contexts. While landscape is often considered in association with the physical features of a territory, the authors call for a holistic view of the landscape itself, which blends physical, social, cultural, environmental, and religious dimensions. To this end, toponyms are useful tools providing the researchers with insights into how people use or used the landscape.

Historical toponomastics is the discipline that deals with the reconstruction of the roots of toponyms in the context of well-known languages/language families (e.g., Indo-European) and in the presence of available historical records. The analysis of the etymology and morphology of a place name occurs not just at the linguistic level, but also incorporates the assessment of the territory’s geology and hydro-geo-morphology. This chapter presents a step-by-step guide in historical toponomastics that involves both linguistic and extra-linguistic analyses. The authors apply this to two toponyms from the Indo-European language family, Sessame and Squaneto, both located in Piedmont, northwest Italy. This chapter also discusses the notion of ‘folk etymology’ and ‘toponymic paretymology’, often observed in the stories told by local speakers trying to explain the origins and meanings of their toponyms. These ‘explanations’ may not always be accurate. These, indeed, originate from the linguistic misinterpretations of place names, when the original morphology and/or meaning of toponyms are lost over time. This chapter explores two types of toponymic paretymologies – ‘bona fide paretymology’ and ‘scholarly paretymology’, with examples from both Indo-European and non-Indo-European contexts. The chapter also presents an in-depth discussion of contact etymology.

Historical geography is one of the disciplines associated with toponymy and historical toponomastics. It aims to investigate the settlements and land uses of a place with evidence from archival sources and can help to analyse the remote origins of place names. This is evident in the example of Bistagno, a village located in Piedmont, northwest Italy. A number of scholars have used historical-geographic methods and sources to account for its name, with varying degrees of success. Methods and sources from historical geography can also be used in more contemporary contexts. For example, another case study shows how written records and newspapers were utilised to study the many toponyms renamed after Romania turned Communist – with the aim of celebrating the Communist ideology, figures, and worldview. This was followed by an extensive renaming in Romania’s post-Communist/post-Socialist era, when the new leaders removed links to Communism. In the case study of Singapore, the authors trace the names and naming processes connected with three toponyms in the relatively young nation, by using maps, archival documents, and books. The new field of study, historical geographic information systems, brings a new tool to the historical analysis of environments and geographic areas.

The title of this chapter is an adaptation of the title of an important book about linguistic structures and processes of early Indo-European as they experienced transformed expression in the evolved, and evolving, linguistic structures of ancient Greek.1 Like that work, this study is concerned with the diachronic and synchronic intersection of structures. But while that work chiefly and expansively addresses morpho-phonological matters of dialect development, this one is a much more modest lexical study (a set of fairly fine-grained lexical analyses) of specific elements of Greek divination, one that finds particular inspiration in Benveniste’s (1969) Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. What follows is a study of linguistic and cultural structures in which I hypothesize (1) that deliberate intellectual or cognitive engagement is the expected response to the production of Greek prophetic signs and (2) that this state of affairs continues, at least in part, idealized practices of ancestral Indo-European cult. Given that the idea that oracles are puzzles in search of a solution is fundamental to the ancient literary presentation of Greek divination, the first half of this hypothesis may appear trivial; however, what I hope to show is that intellectual engagement with an oracle is a cult act of a more “requisite” nature and attitude than perhaps typically imagined – it is the religiously right response – and that this is so (part two of the hypothesis) for reasons having to do with inherited religious structures (the appearance of the forest may not be substantially changed, but some new understanding of the trees may possibly present itself). I begin with Roman Jakobson, a master analyst of linguistic and cultural structures.

The chapter deals with the Indo-Iranian subfamily, its internal division and characteristic features, and its relation to the other subfamilies. While it shows some interesting unique features, it also often agrees with other branches in particular ones. While some of these are common archaisms, sometimes only attested in a few branches due to the different times of attestation, others are innovations, but mostly they can be parallel or part of an areal spread. Thus, no other branch can be clearly shown to be the nearest relative of Indo-Iranian.

This paper synthesizes evidence for the origin and spread of the Indo-European languages from three disciplines – genomic research, archaeology, and, especially, linguistics – to reassess the validity of the Anatolian and Steppe Hypotheses. Research on ancient DNA reveals a massive migration off the steppe c. 2500 BCE, providing exceptionally strong support for the Steppe hypothesis. However, intriguing questions remain, such as why ancient Greek and Indo-Iranian populations had a smaller proportion of steppe ancestry, and Anatolian apparently had none at all. Lexical and archaeological evidence for wheels and looms provides essential clues about the early separation of Anatolian from the Indo-European community and the late entrance of Greek into the Aegean area. Evidence from the morphologies of the Indo-European languages supports these findings: the morphological patterns of the Anatolian languages show clear archaism, implying earlier separation, while the morphologies of Indo-Iranian and Greek display an array of similarities pointing to relatively late areal contact. Both the lexical and the morphological evidence, then, alongside the genomic and archaeological record, suggests that the Steppe hypothesis offers a preferable solution. Ultimately, these conclusions demonstrate the need for more dynamic models of change, including considerations of contact, stratification, and cross-disciplinary approaches.

This chapter revisits the arguments for and against a Near Eastern inspiration of Hesiod’s well-known Myth of the Ages (or Races), and takes this opportunity to reflect on the criteria that are available to us in assessing the plausibility of literary-historical influence. The degree of similarity between the literary comparanda will naturally remain the first and most obvious criterion, but the story or theme should not also be part of an Indo-European or other tradition, or attributable to common human experience, and further, the story or theme should be quite unique and therefore unlikely to have been fashioned independently in Greece and the Near East. Both considerations naturally oblige the scholar to cast the net more widely, beyond the two standard corpora of Greek and ancient Near Eastern literature, in order to gain an impression of how significant a given parallel is likely to be, in this case ranging from Mesoamerica to the Mahābhārata. While the strength of the Near Eastern parallels leads the author to conclude that the Myth of the Ages is indeed likely to have been inspired by Near Eastern sources, Lardinois is also careful to explain how it came to be anchored in existing and more familiar Greek tales of gods and heroes.

Homeric poetry reflects the developments of several inherited Indo-European myths, including those associated with the Divine Twins, the Dawn goddess, sacral kingship, and others. Just as the study of Indo-European linguistics and poetics contributes to the study of Homeric language, so too have Indo-European perspectives been crucial for the understanding of Homeric themes and characters, including Achilles, Helen, and Penelope.

Chapter 2 describes the set of metaphysical ideas that, roughly speaking, occurred at about the same time in India and Greece and nowhere else . For the sake of clarity I expose, right from the start, the weaknesses of several kinds of explanation, in particular the widely popular assumption of 'influence', while also setting out the evidence for the socio-economic transformations that I regard as the most important but relatively neglected factor.