The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics

by R.L. Trask

With nearly 2400 entries, this dictionary covers every aspect of historical linguistics, from the most venerable work to the exciting advances of the late 20th century. All of the traditional terms appear here, but so are the terms introduced more recently in connection with various subjects such 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 historical linguistics to those of the archaeologists, the anthropologists and the geneticists. There are linguistic examples of the terms that are defined, along with cross-references to related terms and the original literature.

384 pages, Hardcover

Published April 27, 2000

About the author

Robert Lawrence "Larry" Trask was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex in England. He was an authority on the Basque language: his book The History of Basque (1997) is an essential reference on diachronic Basque linguistics and probably the best introduction to Basque linguistics as a whole. He was also an authority on historical linguistics, and had written about the problem of the origin of language. He also published two introductory books to linguistics: Language: The basics (1995) and Introducing Linguistics (coauthored with Bill Mayblin) (2000), and several dictionaries on different topics of this science: A dictionary of grammatical terms in linguistics (1993), A dictionary of phonetics and phonology (1996), A student's dictionary of language and linguistics (1997), Key concepts in language and linguistics (1999), The dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics (2000) and The Penguin dictionary of English grammar (2000).

He was at work compiling an etymological dictionary of Basque when he died, posthumously published by Max W. Wheeler (Etymological Dictionary of Basque, 2008).