Invited lecture: How much can we know about ancient language contacts?
Sally Thomason gave an invited talk, “How much can we know about ancient language contacts?” at the workshop on Interaction and Networking: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives, which was part of the project Early Networking in Northern
Fennoscandia held in Oslø, Norway.
Abstract
For the vast majority of the world’s language families, there are no written records to help with the task of unraveling language history. It is nevertheless possible, in favorable circumstances, to identify a history of language contact and to establish the existence and direction of contact-induced language changes. This paper discusses methodological criteria for distinguishing favorable from unfavorable circumstances, using the Pacific Northwest Sprachbund of North America as an example. The paper concludes with some observations about contributions that linguistic evidence can and can’t make — in conjunction with evidence from archaeology, cultural anthropology, and genetics — to efforts to understand human history.