Gamkrelidze Th. V., Ivanov V.V. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans

A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and a Proto-Culture. — Mouton De Gruyter, 2000. — 1228 p.(Volumes I and II of the text of the original Russian edition have been combined in the English
version as Part I; the Bibliography and Indexes are published as Part II.)The authors propose a revision of views on a number of central issues of Indo-European studies. Based on findings of typology, they suggest an analysis of the phonological system of Proto-Indo-European (the "glottalic" theory); they offer novel assumptions about the relative chronology of changes in PIE vowels and laryngeals. Their conclusions are compared with data from Proto-Kartvelian. In the second part of the book, a semantically organized presentation of material from the lexicon is combined with analyses of the use of forms and formulae in a broadly defined cultural context. Again similarities with properties of primarily Kartvelian and Semitic are described, and extended close contacts with these language families are postulated. This necessarily leads to a proposal to place the hypothetical Urheimat of the Indo-Europeans in the region south of the Caucasus.