The Ancient Greek lexicon contains words that cannot be explained by an Indo-European origin. Many of such words can be explained as loanwords of a Pre-Greek substrate or as Semitic loanwords....Show moreThe Ancient Greek lexicon contains words that cannot be explained by an Indo-European origin. Many of such words can be explained as loanwords of a Pre-Greek substrate or as Semitic loanwords. However, some Greek words seem to originate from a Semitic language, but the morphology and phonology point towards a Pre-Greek origin. To solve this apparent discrepancy, the possibility that Semitic loanwords entered the Greek lexicon via Pre-Greek is examined in this thesis. A sample of fourteen obscure Greek words confirms this hypothesis. The words share semantical and phonological features with equivalent words in Semitic languages, but share phonological and morphological features with Pre-Greek as well. Especially the occurrence of Pre-Greek suffixes that are not present in the Semitic equivalents are strong arguments in favor of this hypothesis. Besides examples of Semitic influence on Pre-Greek, this thesis provides two possible examples of Pre-Greek loanwords in Semitic languages. These findings develop our knowledge of language contact in the Mediterranean region during the Bronze and Iron Age.Show less
Genitive of negation is a morpho-syntactic phenomenon whose study in Gothic has always been neglected. In this thesis, I will attempt to analyze such phenomenon from a semantic viewpoint. I will...Show moreGenitive of negation is a morpho-syntactic phenomenon whose study in Gothic has always been neglected. In this thesis, I will attempt to analyze such phenomenon from a semantic viewpoint. I will put forth the hypothesis that not only GENNEG was an available feature in Gothic, but also that its traits as found in the “Gothic Bible” suggest that the phenomenon (already limited in its application) was probably entering moribund phase, and that it was, therefore, probably not loaned from Proto-Slavic but rather inherited from a previous linguistic stage.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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In this thesis I evaluate the phonology of the Malberg glosses to see whether the language of the glosses is Old Dutch, as is oftentimes claims. Due to the impenetrability of the data and its early...Show moreIn this thesis I evaluate the phonology of the Malberg glosses to see whether the language of the glosses is Old Dutch, as is oftentimes claims. Due to the impenetrability of the data and its early date, this question is hard to answer. However, I have found evidence to suggest that the language of the glosses is not the same as Old Dutch.Show less
