In The Precursors of Proto-Indo-European some of the world’s leading experts in historical linguistics shed new light on two hypotheses about the prehistory of the Indo-European language family, the so-called Indo-Anatolian and Indo-Uralic hypotheses. The Indo-Anatolian hypothesis states that the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family should be viewed as a sister language of ‘classical’ Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of all the other, non-Anatolian branches. The common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, including Anatolian, can then be called Proto-Indo-Anatolian. The Indo-Uralic hypothesis states that the closest genetic relative of Indo-European is the Uralic language family, and that both derive from a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-Uralic. The book unravels the history of these hypotheses and scrutinizes the evidence for and against them.

Contributors are Stefan H. Bauhaus, Rasmus G. Bjørn, Dag Haug, Petri Kallio, Simona Klemenčič, Alwin Kloekhorst, Frederik Kortlandt, Guus Kroonen, Martin J. Kümmel, Milan Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg, Alexander Lubotsky, Rosemarie Lühr, Michaël Peyrot, Tijmen Pronk, Andrei Sideltsev, Michiel de Vaan, Mikhail Zhivlov.

In The Reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals in Celtic, Nicholas Zair for the first time collects and assesses all the words from the Celtic languages which contained a laryngeal, and identifies the regular results of the laryngeals in each phonetic environment. This allows him to formulate previously unrecognised sound changes affecting Proto-Celtic, and assess the competing explanations for other developments. This work has far-reaching consequences for the understanding of the historical phonology and morphology of the Celtic languages, and for etymological work involving the Celtic language, along with implications for Indo-European sound laws and the Indo-European syllable. A major conclusion is that the laryngeals cannot be used to argue for an Italo-Celtic language family.