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Indo-European studies (German:Indogermanistik) is a field oflinguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing withIndo-European languages, both current and extinct.[1] The goal of those engaged in these studies is to amass information about the hypotheticalproto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbedProto-Indo-European (PIE), and its speakers, theProto-Indo-Europeans, including theirsociety andProto-Indo-European mythology. The studies cover where the language originated and how it spread. This article also lists Indo-European scholars, centres, journals and book series.
The termIndo-European itself now current in English literature, was coined in 1813 by the British scholar SirThomas Young, although at that time, there was no consensus as to the naming of the recently discovered language family. However, he seems to have used it as a geographical term, to indicate the newly proposed language family inEurasia spanning from theIndian subcontinent till theEuropean continent. Among the other names suggested were:
Rask'sjapetisk or "Japhetic languages", after the old notion of "Japhetites" and ultimatelyJapheth, son of the BiblicalNoah, parallels the termSemitic, from Noah's sonShem, andHamitic, from Noah's sonHam. Japhetic and Hamitic are both obsolete, apart from occasional dated use of term "Hamito-Semitic" for theAfro-Asiatic languages.
In English,Indo-German was used by J. C. Prichard in 1826 although he preferredIndo-European. In French, use ofindo-européen was established by A. Pictet (1836). In German literature,Indoeuropäisch was used byFranz Bopp since 1835, while the termIndogermanisch had already been introduced byJulius von Klapproth in 1823, intending to include the northernmost and the southernmost of the family's branches, as it were as an abbreviation of the full listing of involved languages that had been common in earlier literature.Indo-Germanisch became established by the works ofAugust Friedrich Pott, who understood it to include the easternmost and the westernmost branches, opening the doors to ensuing fruitless discussions whether it should not beIndo-Celtic, or evenTocharo-Celtic.
Today,Indo-European,indo-européen is well established in English and French literature, whileIndogermanisch remains current in German literature, but alongside a growing number of uses ofIndoeuropäisch. Similarly,Indo-Europees has now largely replaced the still occasionally encounteredIndogermaans in Dutch scientific literature.
Indo-Hittite is sometimes used for the wider family including Anatolian by those who consider that IE and Anatolian are comparable separate branches.
Thecomparative method was formally developed in the 19th century and applied first to Indo-European languages. The existence of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had been inferred bycomparative linguistics as early as 1640, while attempts at an Indo-European proto-language reconstruction date back as far as 1713. However, by the 19th century, still no consensus had been reached about the internal groups of the IE family.
The method ofinternal reconstruction is used to compare patterns within onedialect, without comparison with other dialects and languages, to try to arrive at an understanding of regularities operating at an earlier stage in that dialect. It has also been used to infer information about earlier stages of PIE than can be reached by the comparative method.
The IE languages are sometimes hypothesized to be part of super-families such asNostratic orEurasiatic.
Theancient Greeks were aware that their language had changed since the time ofHomer (about 730 BC).Aristotle (about 330 BC) identified four types of linguistic change: insertion, deletion, transposition and substitution. In the 1st century BC, the Romans were aware of the similarities between Greek and Latin.[citation needed]
In thepost-classical West, with the influence ofChristianity[citation needed], language studies were undermined by the attempt to derive all languages from Hebrew since the time ofSaint Augustine. Prior studies classified the European languages asJaphetic. One of the first scholars to challenge the idea of a Hebrew root to the languages of Europe wasJoseph Scaliger (1540 – 1609). He identified Greek,Germanic, Romance and Slavic language groups by comparing the word for "God" in various European languages. In 1710,Leibniz applied ideas ofgradualism anduniformitarianism to linguistics in a short essay.[2] Like Scaliger, he rejected a Hebrew root, but also rejected the idea of unrelated language groups and considered them all to have a common source.[3]
Around the 12th century, similarities between European languages became recognised. In Iceland, scholars noted the resemblances between Icelandic and English.[citation needed]Gerald of Wales claimed thatWelsh,Cornish, andBreton were descendants of a common source. A study of theInsular Celtic languages was carried out byGeorge Buchanan in the 16th century and the first field study was byEdward Lhuyd around 1700. He published his work in 1707,[4] shortly after translating a study byPaul-Yves Pezron[5] on Breton.[6]
Grammars of European languages other than Latin and Classical Greek began to be published at the end of the 15th century. This led to comparison between the various languages.[citation needed]
In the 16th century, visitors to India became aware of similarities between Indian and European languages. For example,Filippo Sassetti reported striking resemblances between Sanskrit and Italian.[7]
In his 1647 essay,[8]Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn proposed the existence of a primitive common language he called "Scythian". He included in its descendantsDutch,German,Latin,Greek, andPersian, and his posthumously publishedOriginum Gallicarum liber[9] of 1654 addedSlavic,Celtic andBaltic.[10] The 1647 essay discusses, as a first, the methodological issues in assigning languages to genetic groups. For example, he observed thatloanwords should be eliminated in comparative studies, and also correctly put great emphasis on common morphological systems and irregularity as indicators of relationship.[11] A few years earlier, the Silesian physicianJohann Elichmann (1601/02 – 1639) already used the expressionex eadem origine (from a common source) in a study published posthumously in 1640.[12] He related European languages toIndo-Iranian languages (which includeSanskrit).[11]
The idea that the first language was Hebrew continued to be advanced for some time:Pierre Besnier (1648 – 1705) in 1674 published a book which was translated into English the following year:A philosophical essay for the reunion of the languages, or, the art of knowing all by the mastery of one.[13]
Leibniz in 1710 proposed the concept of the so-calledJaphetic language group, consisting of languages now known as Indo-European, which he contrasted with the so-calledAramaic languages (now generally known asSemitic).
The concept of actually reconstructing an Indo-European proto-language was suggested byWilliam Wotton in 1713, while showing, among others, that Icelandic ("Teutonic"), the Romance languages and Greek were related.[11]
In 1741Gottfried Hensel (1687 – 1767) published a language map of the world in hisSynopsis Universae Philologiae. He still believed that all languages were derived from Hebrew.
Mikhail Lomonosov compared numbers and other linguistic features in different languages of the world including Slavic, Baltic ("Kurlandic"), Iranian ("Medic"), Finnish, Chinese,Khoekhoe ("Hottentot") and others. He emphatically expressed the antiquity of the linguistic stages accessible to comparative method in the drafts for hisRussian Grammar published in 1755:[14]
Imagine the depth of time when these languages separated! ... Polish and Russian separated so long ago! Now think how long ago Kurlandic! Think when Latin, Greek, German, and Russian! Oh, great antiquity!
Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux (1691 – 1779) sent aMémoire to the FrenchAcadémie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1767 in which he demonstrated the similarity between the Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, German and Russian languages.[15]
Despite the above, the discovery of the genetic relationship of the whole family of Indo-European languages is often attributed to SirWilliam Jones, a British judge inIndia, who, in a 1786 lecture (published 1788) remarked:
The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.[16]
In his 1786The Sanskrit Language, Jones postulated aproto-language uniting six branches: Sanskrit (i.e.Indo-Aryan), Persian (i.e.Iranian), Greek, Latin,Germanic and Celtic. In many ways his work was less accurate than his predecessors', as he erroneously includedEgyptian,Japanese andChinese in the Indo-European languages, while omittingHindi.[11]
In 1814 the young DaneRasmus Christian Rask submitted an entry to an essay contest on Icelandic history, in which he concluded that the Germanic languages were (as we would put it) in the same language family as Greek, Latin, Slavic, and Lithuanian. He was in doubt about Old Irish, eventually concluding that it did not belong with the others (he later changed his mind), and further decided that Finnish and Hungarian were related but in adifferent family, and that "Greenlandic" (Kalaallisut) represented yet athird. He was unfamiliar with Sanskrit at the time. Later, however, he learned Sanskrit, and published some of the earliest Western work on ancient Iranian languages.
August Schleicher was the first scholar to compose a tentative reconstructed text in the extinctcommon source that Van Boxhorn and later scholars had predicted (see:Schleicher's fable). The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) represents, by definition, the common language of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. This early phase culminates inFranz Bopp'sComparative Grammar[17] of 1833.
The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from Bopp toAugust Schleicher's 1861Compendium[18] and up toKarl Brugmann's 5-volumeGrundriss[19] (outline of Indo-European languages) published from 1886 to 1893. Brugmann'sNeogrammarian re-evaluation of the field andFerdinand de Saussure's proposal[20] of the concept of "consonantal schwa" (which later evolved into thelaryngeal theory) may be considered the beginning of "contemporary" Indo-European studies. The Indo-European proto-language as described in the early 1900s in its main aspects is still accepted today, and the work done in the 20th century has been cleaning up and systematizing, as well as the incorporation of new language material, notably theAnatolian andTocharian branches unknown in the 19th century, into the Indo-European framework.
Notably, thelaryngeal theory, in its early forms barely noticed except as a clever analysis, became mainstream after the 1927[21] discovery byJerzy Kuryłowicz of the survival of at least some of these hypothetical phonemes in Anatolian.Julius Pokorny in 1959 published hisIndogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, an updated and slimmed-down reworking of the three-volumeVergleichendes Wörterbuch der indogermanischen Sprachen of Alois Walde and Julius Pokorny (1927 – 1932). Both of these works aim to provide an overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated until the early 20th century, but with only stray comments on the structure of individual forms; in Pokorny 1959, then-recent trends of morphology and phonology (e.g., the laryngeal theory), go unacknowledged, and he largely ignores Anatolian and Tocharian data.
The generation of Indo-Europeanists active in the last third of the 20th century, such asOswald Szemerényi,Calvert Watkins,Warren Cowgill,Jochem Schindler,Helmut Rix, developed a better understanding of morphology and, in the wake of Kuryłowicz's 1956L'apophonie en indo-européen,[22]ablaut. Rix'sLexikon der indogermanischen Verben appeared in 1997 as a first step towards a modernization of Pokorny's dictionary; corresponding tomes addressing the noun,Nomina im Indogermanischen Lexikon, appeared in 2008, and pronouns and particles,Lexikon der indogermanischen Partikeln und Pronominalstämme, in 2014.[23] Current efforts are focused on a better understanding of the relative chronology within the proto-language, aiming at distinctions of "early", "middle" and "late", or "inner" and "outer" PIE dialects, but a general consensus has yet to form. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian began to be of a certainty sufficient stage to allow it to influence the image of the proto-language (see alsoIndo-Hittite).
Such attempts at recovering a sense of historical depth in PIE have been combined with efforts towards linking the history of the language with archaeology, notably with theKurgan hypothesis.J. P. Mallory's 1989In Search of the Indo-Europeans and 1997Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture gives an overview of this. Purely linguistic research was bolstered by attempts to reconstruct the culture and mythology of the Proto-Indo-Europeans by scholars such asGeorges Dumézil, as well as by archaeology (e. g.Marija Gimbutas,Colin Renfrew) and genetics (e. g.Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza). These speculations about therealia of Proto-Indo-European culture are however not part of the field of comparative linguistics, but rather a sister-discipline.
(historical; see below for contemporary IE studies)
The following universities have institutes or faculties devoted to IE studies:
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