Proto-Slavic Inflectional Morphology

On October 9th Associate Professor Thomas Olander defended his doctoral dissertation ”Proto-Slavic Inflectional Morphology”.

Slavic languages stem from Proto-Slavic. There is no existing written documentation of Proto-Slavic; however, it can be partially reconstructed through a historical-comparative linguistic analysis. Thomas Olander´s study takes its point of departure in Proto-Slavic proper as it was spoken around 600 AD. Unlike other studies of this scope, it considers evidence from the birch bark letters excavated in the Novgorod area from around 1950.

The defence was live-streamed by the Faculty and is available as a podcast.

Based on the thesis, a monograph was published: Proto-Slavic inflectional morphology: A comparative handbook (Brill’s Studies in Indo-European Languages and Linguistics 14). Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2015.