Comparative Greek and Latin Grammar

Catalog description

This course establishes the historical, linguistic and cultural foundations of proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancestral language which underlies most of the languages of Europe and some of the languages of western Asia and the Indian subcontinent. In the first part of the course, a uniform reconstructed system for the protolanguage is developed, based on the comparative analysis of the major branches of the Indo:-European language family. Once the essential character of the protolanguage has been established, the course concentrates on the evolution of the two classical languages, Greek and Latin, as historical outcomes of the proto-Indo-European ancestral system. Special emphasis is laid on the systematic study of the vocabulary, the sound system and the system of word-formation, and on the similarities and differences which are evident in the two classical languages.