Georgiev Vladimir I. Introduction to the History of the Indo-European Language

Publishing House of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1981. — 427 p.This book is an expanded version of the lectures I delivered during the autumn of 1956 at the Philological Faculty of Moscow University. The separate chapters are linked to each other by an intrinsic interrelation. My aim is to present the most recent achievements and the major problems in comparative-historical linguistics, as well as their varying reflection on the problems of the origin of and the relationships between the language groups within the Indo-European family. For this reason the book includes an exhaustive analysis of the problem of the gutturals which is closely connected with the problems of the dialectal classification of the Indo-European languages. I am aware that some of my assumptions are hypothetical, but analysis of facts which are very complicated and often insufficient makes this inevitable. The problem is: which hypotheses have we already gone beyond and which can be considered to be the most probable, given the existing situation in Indo-European linguistics? I will consider that I have achieved my aim if I succeed in drawing the attention of the reader to these problems.