About the lecture

In this module, we introduce the concept of language-families and (in particular) the family known as Indo-European, which contains most major current languages of Europe, South Asia and parts of Western and Central Asia. In particular, we introduce the notional common ancestor for all these languages, known as Proto-Indo-European, and the idea of ‘genetic relatedness’ between languages.

About the lecturer

Geoff Horrocks is Professor of Comparative Philology and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. He is the author of the seminal work Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers. He is particularly interested in theories of language structure and language change in their application to the Greek language in all its varieties from the earliest attestations in the second millennium BC to the present day. He also has a secondary interest in the development of Latin, both in its Italian context and in its relationships with other languages as it spread within the Roman empire, including contact with Greek