This comparative dictionary provides a bottom-up reconstruction of the Rote‑Meto languages of western Timor. Rote-Meto is one low-level Austronesian subgroup of eastern Indonesia/Timor-Leste. It contains 1,174 reconstructions to Proto-Rote-Meto (or a lower node) with supporting evidence from the modern Rote-Meto languages. These reconstructions are accompanied by information on how they relate to forms in other languages including Proto‑Malayo‑Polynesian etyma (where known) and/or out-comparisons to putative cognates in other languages of the region. The dictionary also contains two finder-lists: English to Rote-Meto, and Austronesian reconstructions with Rote-Meto reflexes. The dictionary is preceded by three introductory chapters. The first chapter contains a guide to using the dictionary as well as discussion of the data sources. The second chapter provides a short synchronic overview of the Rote-Meto langauges. The third chapter discusses the historical background of Rote-Meto. This includes sound correspondences, the internal subgrouping of the Rote-Meto family, and the position of Rote-Meto within Malayo-Polynesian more broadly. Searchable electronic versions of the comparative dictionary are provided in two formats at http://hdl.handle.net/1885/251618. The first electronic version is a Lexique Pro export of the dictionary. The Lexique Pro file contains the same data and information in the book version of the dictionary, but does not contain the introductory chapters. See the "About Rote-Meto" tab of the Lexique Pro file for more information on this version of the dictionary. The second electronic version is a text file. It is formatted as a tab separated file and is intended to be read in spreadsheet format. This text file does not contain all the data and information in other versions of the Rote-Meto Comparative Dictionary and should be used in conjunction with these other versions. See the associated readme for more information on what data is included and excluded from that text file.

What can the languages spoken today tell us about the history of their speakers? This question is crucial in insular Southeast Asia and New Guinea, where thousands of languages are spoken, but written historical records and archaeological evidence is yet lacking in most regions. While the region has a long history of contact through trade, marriage exchanges, and cultural-political dominance, detailed linguistic studies of the effects of such contacts remain limited. This volume investigates how loanwords can prove past contact events, taking into consideration ten different regions located in the Philippines, Eastern Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and New Guinea. Each chapter studies borrowing across the borders of language families, and discusses implications for the social history of the speech communities.

This is the very first publication mapping onomatopoeia in the languages of the world. The publication provides a comprehensive, multi-level description of onomatopoeia in the world’s languages. The sample covers six macro-areas defined in the WALS: Euroasia, Africa, South America, North America, Australia, Papunesia. Each language-descriptive chapter specifies phonological, morphological, word-formation, semantic, and syntactic properties of onomatopoeia in the particular language. Furthermore, it provides information about the approach to onomatopoeia in individual linguistic traditions, the sources of data on onomatopoeia, the place and the function of onomatopoeia in the system of each language.

This is a comprehensive grammar of the Papuan language Bunaq as spoken in the district of Lamaknen. Bunaq belongs to the Timor-Alor-Pantar language family, which comprises the westernmost Papuan languages. Surrounded on all sides by Austronesian languages, Bunaq has developed in isolation from other members of the family, and as a result shows a range of unique morphosyntactic patterns. This grammar provides a detailed synchronic description of Bunaq based on a functional-typological approach. Following additional fieldwork and containing new material and analyses, this book is a thoroughly revised version of the author’s 2010 PhD thesis, which won the Pāṇini Award of the Association for Linguistic Typology.

Historical and comparative linguistics has been a major scholarly discipline for 200 years, and yet this is the first dictionary ever devoted to it. With nearly 2400 entries, this dictionary covers every aspect of the subject, from the most venerable work to the exciting advances of the last few years, many of which have not even made it into textbooks yet.All of the traditional terms are here, but so are the terms only introduced recently, in connection with such varied subjects as pidgin and creole languages, the sociolinguistic study of language change, mathematical and computational methods, the novel approaches to linguistic geography, the controversial proposals of new and vast language families, and the attempts at relating the results of the historical linguists to those of the archaeologists, the anthropologists and the geneticists.More than just a dictionary, this book provides genuine linguistic examples of most of the terms entered, detailed explanations of fundamental concepts, critical assessment of controversial ideas, cross-references to related terms, and an abundance of references to the original literature.Features:*The first dictionary in the field.*Comprehensive coverage.*Clearly written and accurate entries.*Covers traditional and contemporary terminology.*Provides linguistic examples of terms defined.*Supplies numerous cross-references to related terms.*Includes hundreds of references to the original literature.

This comprehensive dictionary provides an essential resource for students, scholars, and translators of German and English. The dictionary includes over 90,000 entries, with detailed definitions, conjugations, and examples of usage. This book is an essential resource for linguists, language teachers, and anyone looking to improve their command of the German and English languages. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Hamburg (Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: What is the most likely performed action of a person who stumbles over a yet to him unknown or unfamiliar word? It is neither the internet nor the television (which holds plenty of information and is without a doubt the most important source in requiring recent news) but the dictionary he will seek his information in. In the time of globalization, the influence and significance of communicating with humans of different speaking languages is raising. Language is first of all a means of communication and it is no exaggeration if one is proclaiming that knowing more than the native tongue and being at least bilingual has become a normalcy. If we want to understand and communicate with people of other nations, we ultimately have to learn their language and vice versa. Dictionaries provide the basic information if it is about learning something of different languages. The importance of the dictionary becomes evident by the fact that over 90 % of households in Britain possess at least one dictionary, therefore making it far more popular than the Bible, which was to be found in about 80 % of households in England in 1983, according to the Bible Society. 1 The dictionary being referred to in this term paper is one particular type of dictionary, namely the monolingual dictionary for the adult native speaker of English. The aim of this work is to outline the history as well as the structure of a common dictionary. How is it arranged, what content and information does it provide and what purposes does it fulfil? These and other questions will be subjects of concern. Besides dictionaries, other helpful sources exist in attaining a language’s vocabulary, phrases and synonyms. One of these excellent sources is a thesaurus, which will be the subject of the second half in this term paper. Stress is being put on the history as well as the structure and content of a thesaurus.