Corpus language

As body language (also: rubble language or residual language ) refers to an extinct language that only through a text corpus is documented. In addition, the condition is sometimes added that a language to be designated as a corpus language does not have any surviving offshoots such as B. may have the Romance languages as daughter languages of Latin .

Since mostly not all forms can be reconstructed on the basis of a small traditional corpus, the grammatical structure and vocabulary of a corpus language can only be determined very incompletely in such cases. In languages that have only been handed down in inscriptions, it is often only possible to determine verb forms of the third person and some case forms. In other cases, only a few words have survived in word lists or individual language documents in an unknown script (e.g. the Phaistos Disc ).

Languages with only a very limited known vocabulary and accordingly mostly only incompletely known morphology are called debris languages. In individual cases, the relationships to other known languages cannot be clarified or only incompletely or the related languages are also debris languages (e.g. in the old European languages such as Iberian , Pictish , Pelasgian ).

Examples of corpus languages without a living continuation are the Italian languages (with the exception of Latin), Gothic and numerous ancient Indo-European (such as Tocharian and Hittite ).

literature

Heinrich Beck: Germanic residual and debris languages. (Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde - supplementary volumes, vol. 3). De Gruyter; Berlin 1989 (Reprint 2012), ISBN 3-1101-1948-X
Jürgen Untermann: Debris between grammar and history. Rheinisch-Westphalian Academy of Sciences. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften / Springer-Verlag, Opladen 1980, ISBN 3-531-07245-5