| Title:
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EXAMINING THE FARMING/LANGUAGE DISPERSAL HYPOTHESIS
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| By: |
Peter Bellwood (Editor), Lord Colin Renfrew (Editor) |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| List price:
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£50.00 |
| Our price: |
£42.50 |
| Discount: |
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£7.50 |
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| ISBN 10: |
1902937201 |
| ISBN 13: |
9781902937205 |
| Availability: |
Usually dispatched within 3-5 days.
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| Stock: |
Currently 1item in stock |
| Publisher: |
MCDONALD INSTITUTE FOR ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH |
| Pub. date: |
12 December, 2002 |
| Series: |
McDonald Institute Monographs |
| Pages: |
520 |
| Description: |
A radical new theory of how languages were dispersed around the globe is debated by experts in historical linguistics, prehistoric archaeology, molecular genetics and human ecology. |
| Synopsis: |
Linguistic diversity is one of the most puzzling and challenging features of humankind. Why are there some six thousand different languages spoken in the world today? Why are some, like Chinese or English, spoken by millions over vast territories, while others are restricted to just a few thousand speakers in a limited area? The farming/language dispersal hypothesis makes the radical and controversial proposal that the present-day distributions of many of the world's languages and language families can be traced back to early developments in farming and their dispersal from the several nuclear areas where animal and plant domestication emerged. For instance, the Indo-European and Austronesian language families may owe their current vast distributions to the spread of food plants and of farmers following the Neolithic revolutions which took place in the Near East and in Eastern Asia respectively, thousands of years ago. In this book international experts in historical linguistics, prehistoric archaeology, molecular genetics and human ecology bring their specialisms to bear upon this intractable problem. There are signs that a new synthesis between these fields may now be emerging.This is a challenging and path-breaking volume; it presents several new perspectives and indicates some of the directions which future research is likely to follow. |
| Illustrations: |
88 figs, 21 tables |
| Publication: |
UK |
| Imprint: |
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research |
| Returns: |
Returnable |