The Reconstruction of Indo-European Stop Systems

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, Oliver Sayeed, Peter Schrijver, Michiel de Vaan, and Bert Vaux.

Author Biography

Alwin Kloekhorst, Ph.D. (2007), Leiden University, is Professor of Anatolian Linguistics at LUCL. He has published extensively on Indo-European and Anatolian linguistics, including the monographs Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon (Brill, 2008), Accent in Hittite (Harrassowitz, 2014), and Kanišite Hittite (Brill, 2019).

Tijmen Pronk, Ph.D. (2009), Leiden University, is Assistant Professor of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at LUCL. His research concerns Indo-European vocabulary, phonology and morphology, with a focus on Balto-Slavic. He is co-author of the Croatian Etymological Dictionary (Zagreb, 2016, 2021) and the Indo-European Etymological Dictionary (ongoing project).