Rasmus Rask (1787–1832) was a Danish scholar who, having devoted the early part of his career to the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon languages and literature, embarked upon a journey overland through Russia to India in search of the cradle of the Indo-European languages. He was delighted to rediscover the Avestan Zoroastrian texts preserved by the Parsis which Anquetil du Perron had first reported on sixty years earlier, and further Avestan materials, as well as a lively Zoroastrian community. On his return, he published, first in Danish and then in this German translation (1826), a thorough phonological and morphological analysis which showed that, contrary to the opinion of Anquetil's opponents, the Avestan language and its religious texts were neither a dim folk memory or a deliberate coinage based on Sanskrit, but a very ancient language, originating in Persia, and an important member of the Indo-European language family.
This groundbreaking study aims to provide a philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of terror, in particular the political reactions to it, such as public anxiety and pre-emptive wars, and to re-arti
This entertaining and informative book explores the world of architecture through a series of 101 questions and answers that cover a wide range of issues on its practice and theory. There are historic
Nielsen and Slatkin (both U. of California-Berkeley) present a textbook they developed in and for a one-semester undergraduate course in population genetics. Students should have some basic knowledge
