John D. Bengtson

Linguistic Fossils John D. Bengtson 1st edition

The articles in this book represent a large part of Mr. Bengtson's work in historical linguistics and paleolinguistics over the past few years. The first two articles concern the worldwide picture of a human language family: global etymologies. The third is a brief summary of Mr. Bengtson's current view of the Austric macrofamily. The next six articles are concerned with the so called "isolates," Basque and Burushaski, and Mr. Bengtson's view that they are just members of a larger macrofamily, Dene-Caucasian. The two essays with titles beginning "The Problem of 'Isolates'..." approach the issues in a narrative,minimally technical style, while the other four papers are more detail-oriented and technical. The last two articles concentrate on the Na-Dene family, which Mr. Bengtson's considers an integral part of Dene-Caucasian. It hardly needs saying that much of the content of this book is out of the mainstream of historical linguistic work.