Phonetics and Philology Sound Change in Italic [Hardcover]

This book presents an exhaustive treatment of a long-standing problem of Proto-Indo-European and Italic philology: the development of the Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirates in the ancient languages of Italy. In so doing it tackles a central issue of historical linguistics: the plausibility of explanations for sound change.

1. Introduction: Phonetics and philology
2. The Italic Sound Change: Background
3. Philology: The Evidence For The Italic Development
4. The Traditional Arguments Reviewed
5. Phonetics, Predictions, Parallels
6. A phonetic explanation for the Italic development
7. Concluding Remarks

The sheer exhaustiveness and consummate professionalism of this study are highly commendable... I cannot but applaud the author's efforts to reconstitute the relative chronology of such a complex set of sound correspondences. --Linguist List 16.1701

Jane Stuart-Smithis a Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow. Her main research interests include language change, phonetics, and sociolinguistics, with particular interest in Scots (Glaswegian) and South Asian languages (Panjabi). After an initial training in Comparative Philology and General Linguistics at Oxford University, she spent a year working with Panjabi-English bilinguals in Birmingham before moving to Glasgow where she is carrying out the first major sociophonetic investigation of Glaswegian speech since the early 1970s.