Dissertation

Unde venisti? The Prehistory of Italic through its Loanword Lexicon

On the 1st of November, Andrew Wigman successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Andrew on this achievement!

Author

A.M. Wigman

Date

01 November 2023

Links

Leiden University Repository

Latin is one of the most important Indo-European languages in European history. Between the dissolution of Proto-Indo-European on the Pontic-Caspian steppe and the first attestation of written Latin on the Italian Peninsula, the ancestors of Latin-speakers had more than two millennia to migrate across Europe. The Europe that they entered was not empty however. It had been populated by farmers for three thousand years, and by hunter-gatherers for nearly ten thousand years before that.

This dissertation investigates the lexemes in Latin that may have been borrowed from the languages that these populations spoke and combines the insights gained with lines of evidence from genetics and archaeology to hypothesize on the route that brought the ancestors of Latin-speakers into Italy.