Programme

Introduction
In the off-years of the four-yearly General Conference (Fachtagung) of the Society for Indo-
European Studies, a thematic conference is hosted by a different university each year. The
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) and its Chair of Comparative Indo-
European Studies are grateful to the Society for granting the organization of the 2013
Thematic Conference to Leiden. The conference will be held from 29 to 31 July.
The topic of the meeting will be the lengthened grade, that is, the long vowels *ē and *ō of
Proto-Indo-European. The origin and the phonetics of these vowels, as well as the
grammatical functions which they had, are still very much disputed. The main aim of this
conference is to make explicit on which points scholars of Indo-European agree and disagree
in their interpretation of the available evidence.
We are happy to see that our call for papers has been answered by many scholars from around
the world, young and old, who are engaged in reconstructing the linguistic past of the Indo-
European languages. The programme contains talks on all of the main branches of Indo-
European, and on a wide variety of theoretical questions concerning the phonology and
morphology of Proto-Indo-European. The conference will be closed by a Round Table
Discussion, in which the main themes and various positions which one may take towards
them will be debated by an expert panel. A selection of topics to be discussed by the panel can
be found at the end of this booklet.
This conference was preceded by the 8 th Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics
(15–26 July), which features Indo-European programmes for beginners and for advanced
students, as well as specialized courses in various Indo-European branches.
The organisation of this conference has been sponsored by Leiden University Fund (LUF),
Brill Publishers, and the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.
Lucien van Beek
Alwin Kloekhorst
Alexander Lubotsky
Michiel de Vaan
Leiden, July 2013
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