Hannes A. Fellner

University of Vienna | UniWien · Institut für Sprachwissenschaft

The popularity of computational methods in historical linguistics has primarily been motivated by mere access to the new methods themselves, rather than by looking for tools to solve problems. Investigators have looked for problems with which to showcase their tools. This dynamic is one reason why eye-catching but long-solved problems, such as the...

“Back to the Root” constitutes the proceedings of the 15th Fachtagung of the Indogermanische Gesellschaft, held in Vienna 13-16 September 2016. Despite the prominence of the general concept of the root in the reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language (and in linguistic theory), the properties of Indo-European roots have so far received com...

The Yellow Peril, be it economic, political, cultural or military, is the focus of the world's media and the focal point of debates among politicians. For the first time, 20 experts from Europe, Asia, America and Africa have been brought together for a book in which this hot topic is examined from all sides. At a time when the discussion about Chin...

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This volume celebrates the work of the American linguist Mark R. Hale with contributions from general and historical linguistics, especially comparative Indo-European linguistics, phonological and syntactic theory, and language change.

This rich collection of articles pays homage to many of the remarkably broad and interdisciplinary interests embodied in the work of Prof. Georges-Jean Pinault. It contains not only historical and synchronic linguistic studies of numerous ancient languages—especially Tocharian, Sanskrit, Greek, and Uyghur—but also editions of several recently disco...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a first introduction to our research project The Characters that Shaped the Silk Road—A Database and Digital Paleography of Tarim Brahmi. The project aims to provide a comprehensive paleographic survey of the Brahmi variant of Central Asia and, to that end, develop digital tools for the study of this writing...

In this paper we argue that the suffixes *-nt- and *-mh1no- were grammaticalized as active and middle participles after Anatolian left the family. Anatolian inherited *-nt-, which originally functioned as a denominal possessive suffix. In Hittite, the *-nt-suffix is used to form verbal adjectives that express a state and are primarily object orient...

Since early 2011 the Linguistics Department at the University of Vienna has hosted a project to create an electronic edition of all available Tocharian manuscript fragments combined with a linguistic database (Comprehensive Edition of Tocharian Manuscripts [CEToM]: www.univie.ac.at/tocharian). The present study demonstrates how the CEToM database c...

Verbal governing compounds (VGC) in Tocharian were discovered by Bernhard (1958) and first systematically treated by Malzahn (2012). According to Malzahn there are two main types of VGC: (1) a type that ends in TB -i TA -e built to verbal roots without a-character (TB yolo-yāmi ‘evil doing’: TB yām- ‘make, do’; TA rī-pāṣe ‘protecting the city’: TA...

We argue that the Greek and Latin masculine verbal governing compounds in *-ā of the type Gk. βαθυ-δίνης and Lat. agricola are remnants of an older individualizing/ substantivizing function of the suffix *‑eh2, following Nussbaum (2014) and Melchert (2014). This analysis provides additional evidence for the claim that the use of PIE *‑eh2 as a femi...

Tocharian employs a number of semantically and morphologically related agent formations in B -a and A -ø (formations in B-tsa A-ts, B-ntsa, A-nt, B-nta A-nt, the nt-participle B -ñca A -nt, formations in B -uca, and verbal governing compounds in B -a A -ø) that all inflect in the same way. While there have been different proposals about the PIE ori...

This paper argues that the variation found in the gerundives across and within the Tocharian languages is best explained by assuming that Tocharian inherited two suffixes *-lo- and *-lii̯o-. In the prehistory of Tocharian these suffixes stood in a derivational relationship typical for Indo-European gerundive formations. It is shown that the various...

In June 2013, Tocharian Texts in Context, the first international conference on Tocharian manuscripts and Silk Road culture, was held at the University of Vienna. Studying the two Tocharian languages and their historical and cultural background is impossible in isolation; cooperation with neighbouring disciplines is absolutely necessary. Tocharian...

This paper treats the meaning and origin of the two enigmatic Tocharian A words tläś and lkäś. Based on our new edition and translation of the fragment THT 318/319 we propose that TA tläś belongs to the root tälā- ‘to lift up, carry, bear’ and is a verbal noun meaning ‘the lifting up’. Similarly, relying on a Sanskrit parallel text and arguments fr...

There are two Tocharian languages known to us from original manuscripts found along the Silk Road. The greater part of these manuscripts dates back to the fifth through eighth centuries CE, and almost all of them are in a fragmentary state. There are no contemporary languages of the Tocharian branch. Given these facts, the interpretation of the doc...

Tocharian employs a number of different “agent formations” that all seem to be semantically and morphologically related. The nt-participle in B -ñca A -nt also belongs to this morphological class. From a comparative and historical point of view three things about these forms are in need of explanation: (1) The root-final palatalization of the nt-pa...

Recently the more intensive study of Tocharian nominal morphology has given rise to a fresh look on gender in Tocharian. Kim (2009) claims that Tocharian even shows more archaic features than the so-called inner-Indo-European (“Brugmannian”) languages in terms of female gender. According to Kim, these features contribute to the arguments that Tocha...

Recently, there have been attempts to challenge the status of PIE *-eh2 as a feminine suffix in Tocharian. It has been claimed that there are virtually no traces of *-eh2 in Tocharian nominal morphology and that the instances of *-eh2 that are found do only reflect the continuants of PIE neuter collectives/abstracts. Based on these assumptions, the...

This paper deals with the synchronic problems and diachronic patterning of the frequent Tocharian adjectives in B -tse A -ts and related categories.

This paper scatches the outlines of a philosophy of language from a perspective of dialectical philosophy based on the work of Hans Heinz Holz.

This paper offers a collection of Tocharian verbs that continue PIE eh2-preterite morphology in their preterite particples.

As will become clear from the introductory remarks to this article, there are up to seven different kinds of signatures by which Tocharian texts from the Berlin collection can be and actually have been quoted, so the reader may find this a useful tool.

This paper gives an overview of the various expeditions to the Tarim Basin at the beginning of the 20th century. Knowing where the manuscripts come from, and under what circumstances they were found, is not only a matter of historical interest, but is vital for two reasons. For one thing, it helps understanding how the different collections were co...

One of the many problems in Tocharian historical phonology is the development of labiovelars. Though progress has been made in recent years the exact history of the PIE labiovelars and sequences of palatal/velar plus *u/*w in Tocharian has still to be written. The interesting fact that in the Tocharian script two reflexes of the Proto-Tocharian lab...