John Asher Dunn

A Tsimshian Proto-Indo-European Comparative Lexicon John Asher Dunn

This monograph compares the vocabularies of the Tsimshian family of languages (British Columbia and Alaska) with the the reconstructed ancestral vocabulary of the Indo-European family of languages. It includes information about 458 lexical items in which this relationship is apparent. This information includes material from all the Tsimshian family of languages, Gitksan, Nisgha, Coast Tsimshian, and Southern Tsimshian, as well as Proto-Indo-European etyma taken from the works of Julius Pokorny and Calvert Watkins. It demonstrates the systematic phonological relationships between the two language families. In particular it shows that the Tsimshian family of languages is very conservative, retaining, along with Hittite alone, the ancient, lost laryngeal sounds identified by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1879.