Home

Subject

About half of the world's population speaks an Indo-European language. Now spread all over the globe, this language family has developed from a single pre-historic language spoken before the invention of writing.

Historical Indo-European Linguistics (also called Comparative Philology) studies the Indo-European daughter languages and reconstructs their common ancestor, called Proto-Indo-European (PIE), in various aspects (phonological system, morphology, syntax, lexicon). At the same time, many linguistic features of the individual daughter languages can be explained on the basis of PIE and its subsequent developments into the Germanic languages, Italic (including Romance), Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Celtic languages, Greek, Anatolian (Hittite, etc.), Albanian, and Tocharian. All this is possible because linguistic change is not arbitrary, but based on general principles best visible in phonology and morphology.

The philological treatment of Indo-European languages also leads to insights into the cultural background of the respective language community (history, social structure, religion, philosophy, poetry, etc.).

Indo-European Linguistics is an interdisciplinary subject, dealing with an area ranging from Northern Europe, the Mediterranean, Ancient Anatolia and Mesopotamiato India and West China and with language records going back as far as the 2nd millenium BC. As a branch of linguistics, it applies linguistic theory/theories to ancient, medieval and early modern language data and provides a wealth of information for theories of language change and language typology. In Würzburg, Indo-European Linguistics participates in the Master's program "General and Applied Linguistics" and collaborates closely with other philological disciplines.

Department

The Department of Ancient Studies and its chairs:

Chair of Egyptology

Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies

Chair of Classical Archaeology

Chair of pre- and early archaeology

Further links

Würzburg Centre of Ancient Studies (Würzburger Altertumswissenschaftliches Zentrum)

Society for Indo-European Studies

Opening hours

Secretariat

Monday 08:30 to 16:30
Wednesday/Thursday 13:30 to 16:30
Friday 11:30 to 13:30

Library

Monday to Thursday 10:00 to 16:30
Friday 10:00 to 13:30

Due to the current COVID-19 situation, the library is open for lending only. We kindly ask you to contact us in advance by phone or e-mail, stating the shelf mark of the books you are looking for.

Address

Institut für Altertumswissenschaften
Lehrstuhl für Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft
Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
Oswald-Külpe-Weg 84
97074 Würzburg
Phone: +49 (0)931 31 82826
Mail: vgsp@uni-wuerzburg.de

Term information

Class schedule for winter term 2021/22

News

11. October 2021 --- Research

DFG approves two further research projects at the Chair of Comparative Philology

The German Research Foundation (DFG) will fund two projects at the Chair of Comparative Philology starting next year. Together with colleagues at the Universities of Cologne, Wuppertal and Freiburg, the project VedaWeb will be continued under the direction of Prof. Dr. D. Kölligan ("VedaWeb 2.0") and supplemented by further texts, audios as well as search and annotation possibilities. Dr. J.-S. Kim will create a word index in his project on the Atharvaveda, which will also be included in VedaWeb in digital form.

01 October 2021 --- Research

We are pleased to welcome Éric Dieu as a guest researcher at the Chair of Comparative Philology, who will be working on Ancient Greek accentuation as part of a Humboldt Scholarship.

27 September 2021 --- Winter semester

On October 12, 2021 from 10 am to 12 pm, the preliminary meeting will be held to determine course schedules for the winter semester 2021/22. The meeting is scheduled online, and can be accessed at the following link: https://uni-wuerzburg.zoom.us/j/94386575865?pwd=NXk1QzMrMHFOMzJSdzlWYUt4d0JEZz09

06 July 2021 --- Interview

In the current issue of the online magazine of the University of Würzburg einBLICK an interview with our guest researcher Petr Kocharov has been published: "Was Verben sagen".

06 July 2021 --- Lecture

On 06.07.21 at 18:15 Prof. Dr. Stefan Schaffner (FAU Erlangen/Nuremberg) will give a lecture on the topic:

"Vom Beben der Erde und dem Erderschütterer Poseidon. Tocharisch A wāsk ‚beben, zucken‘ und die Poseidon-Epitheta ἐννοσίγαιος, ἐνοσίχϑων"

March 01, 2021 --- Research

We are pleased to welcome Petr Kocharov as a guest researcher at the Chair of Comparative Philology, who will be working on Armenian verbal morphology as part of a Humboldt Scholarship starting March 2021.

November 2, 2020 --- Information

The Linguistics Department at the University of Göttingen has published a series of video introductions to the grammar of several ancient Indo-European languages under the title "Ancient Indo-European Grammars Online", including a lecture on Classical Armenian by Ronald Kim and Daniel Kölligan.

September 17, 2020 --- Research

The German Rectors' Conference (Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, HRK) will be funding a project developed by Kristina Becker (Würzburg) and Theresa Roth (Marburg) within the initiative "Small subjects: visibly innovative!"

... more

Recent publications

Vath, Bernd. 2021. Die Bußen für Körperverletzung im altirischen Recht. DI ÉRCIB FOLA. Altirischer Gesetzestext, mit Einführung, Übersetzung, Kommentar und Glossar. Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft Neue Folge Band 22. Innsbruck.

Bichlmeier, Harald. 2021. Studien zu den nordostbayerischen Orts- und Flurnamen auf -(n)itz und -(a)tz. Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft, Beiheft 31. Hrsg. von Daniel Kölligan, Norbert Oettinger und Stefan Schaffner. Dettelbach: Röll.

Kassian, Alexei S., Zhivlov, Mikhail, George Starostin,, Trofimov, Artem A., Kocharov, Petr A., Kuritsyna, Anna and Saenko, Mikhail N. 2021. "Rapid radiation of the inner Indo-European languages: an advanced approach to Indo-European lexicostatistics". In: Linguistics – An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences.

Kocharov, Petr / Shatskov, Andrey. 2021. Towards a classification of PIE root extensions. Historische Sprachforschung 131,1.

Kölligan, Daniel. 2021. „Classical Armenian“. In Comparison and Gradation in Indo-European, herausgegeben von Götz Keydana, Wolfgang Hock, und Paul Widmer. The Mouton Handbooks of Indo-European Typology 1. Berlin: De Gruyter, 49–80.

MSS (Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft) 73/2 (2020), hg. v. Daniel Kölligan, Norbert Oettinger und Stefan Schaffner.

Kölligan, Daniel. 2021[2020]. "Language universals and Indo-European: phonological oddities and morphological trends." in: Gli universali e la linguistica – Atti del XLIII Convegno della Società Italiana di Glottologia – Testi raccolti a cura di Diego Poli e Francesca Chiusaroli. Roma: Il Calamo. 71–93.

Kocharov, Petr. 2021. Rezension zu Gabriel Képéklian. 2017. Antoine Meillet. Manuel élémentaire d’arménien classique. Traduit de l’allemand par Gabriel Képéklian. Deuxième tirage revu et corrigé. Limoges, Éditions Lambert-Lucas. 251 S. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 115/2.

Macedo, José Marcos, Daniel Kölligan und Pedro Barbieri. 2021. Πολυώνυμοι - A Lexicon of the Divine Epithets in the Orphic Hymns. Würzburg: WUP (urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-220613).

Kölligan, Daniel. 2021. „Filius superi: zu gr. Ὑπερίων“. Glotta 97, Nr. 1: 92–106.

Kölligan, Daniel. 2021. „Getting There? Greek Δύναμαι, ‚Be Able‘“. In Georgios K. Giannakis, Luz Conti, Jesús de la Villa und Raquel Fornieles (Hgg.) Synchrony and Diachrony of Ancient Greek. Berlin: De Gruyter, 151–62.