Convergence and Divergence of European Languages

Studies in Eurolinguistics , Bd. 1

Per Sture Ureland

ISBN 978-3-8325-0001-6
410 Seiten, Erscheinungsjahr: 2003
Preis: 27.00 €

This is the first Eurolinguistics volume to result from The Second International Symposium of Eurolinguistics held in Pushkin, Russia, in September (10-16), 1999. Since its foundation in January, 1999, the Eurolinguistischer Arbeitskreis Mannheim (ELAMA) has been active in spreading information on the goals of Eurolinguistics.

ELAMA made it a goal to contribute to an encounter between linguists by inviting East-Europeans together with West-Europeans to Pushkin and realised at least moderate success in gaining acceptance of its Europe-wide goals and above all an opening-up of East-European linguistics to West Europeans: articles on the impact of the language of the Hanseatic League on Russian (Sinochkina), the influence of Russian on Polish (Weiß), Armenian (Kozintseva), Tungusic (Malchukov) and that of Saami on Scandinavian languages (Kusmenko). But also other east-oriented articles were the result: ethnolinguistic views of Medieval Lithuania (Bednarczuk), the rise of the Baltic Finnic languages (Laakso) and Yiddish (Kiefer). A South-East European perspective is also presented in the articles on Croatian in contact with Balkan languages (Brozovic Roncevic, Socanac).

The role of Latin for the development of Dutch and German in the Middle Ages (Huizenga and Haage), that of French (Birken-Silverman) and English (Muhvic-Dimanovski) for the enrichment of the European languages of today is also focused upon, articles which clearly demonstrate the significance of an overall European approach to the linguistic situation in Europe in the past and the present.