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Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics, dealing with the Indo-European languages. Its goal is to uncover information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language of the early Bronze Age dubbed Proto-Indo-European (PIE), and its speakers, the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

Comparative Linguistics

The existence of the Proto-Indo-Europeans has been inferred by comparative linguistics. The discovery of the genetic relationship of the various Indo-European languages goes back to William Jones, a British judge in India, who in 1782 observed, that,
"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."

At first, the related languages were simply compared, with no attempt at reconstruction. August Schleicher was the first scholar to compose a tentative text in the extinct common source Jones had predicted. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) represents, by definition, the common language of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. In the 20th century, great progress was made due to the discovery of more language material belonging to the Indo-European family, and by advances in comparative linguistics, by scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure. Purely linguistic research was assisted by attempts to reconstruct the culture and religion of the Proto-Indo-Europeans by scholars such as Georges Dumézil, as well as by archaeology (e. g. Marija Gimbutas, Colin Renfrew) and genetics (e. g. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza).

History of the Field

The formative phase of the field may be considered to begin in the 18th century, with Jones' 1782 discovery, and the beginning research into the grammar and philology of individual non-classical languages. This early phase culminates in Franz Bopp's comparative grammar of 1833. The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from Bopp to August Schleicher's 1861 compendium and up to Karl Brugmann's Grundriss published from the 1880s. Brugmann's junggrammatische re-evalutation of the field, and Ferdinand de Saussure's development of the laryngeal 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 systematization, as well as the incorporation of new language material, notably the Anatolian and Tocharian branches unknown in the 19th century, into the Indo-European framework.

Notably, the laryngeal theory, in its early forms discussed since the 1880s, became mainstream after the 1927 discovery by Jerzy Kuryłowicz of the survival of at least some of these hypothetical phomenes in Anatolian. Julius Pokorny in 1959 published his Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, giving an overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated until the early 20th century, but neglecting then-recent trends of morphology and phonology, and largely ignoring Anatolian and Tocharian.

The generation of Indo-Europeanists active in the last third of the 20th century, such as Calvert Watkins, Jochem Schindler, Helmut Rix, developed a better understanding of morphology and, in the wake of Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophonie, ablaut. The Lexicon of the Indo-European verb edited by Rix appeared in 1997 as a first step towards a modernization of Pokorny's dictionary; a corresponding tome addressing the noun is in preparation *. Current efforts are focussed 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 to allow it influence the image of the proto-language, see also Indo-Hittite.

Such attempts at recovering a sense of historical depth in PIE have been coupled with efforts towards coupling the history of the language with archaeology, notably with the Kurgan hypothesis. J. P. Mallory's 1997 Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture gives an overview of this. These speculations about the realia of Proto-Indo-European culture are however not part of the field of comparative linguistics, but rather a sister-discipline.

List of Indo-Europeanists

(historical, see below for contemporary IE studies)

Journals

Contemporary IE studies

The following universities have institutes devoted to IE studies (incomplete):

Origin of the Term

The term Indo-European itself now current in English literature, was coined in 1813 by the British scholar Sir Thomas Young, although at that time, there was no consensus as to the naming of the recently discovered language family. Among the names suggested were:

In English, Indo-German was used by J. C. Prichard in 1826 although he preferred Indo-European. In French, use of indo-européen was established by A. Pictet (1836). In German literature, Indo-Europäisch was used by Franz Bopp since 1835, while the term Indo-Germanisch was introduced by Julius 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 of August Friedrich Pott, who understood it to include the easternmost and the westernmost branches, opening the doors to ensuing fruitless discussions whether it should not be Indo-Celtic, or even Tocharo-Celtic.

That many of the names include the Germanic languages, this does not mean that the German language is somehow more related to the origins, it is, rather, because Germanic branch was considered the (north-western) geographical extreme, as opposed to the (south-eastern) Indo-Aryan branch.

Today, Indo-European, Indo-Européen is well established in English and French literature, while Indo-Germanisch remains current in German literature, but alongside a growing number of uses of Indo-Europäisch.

See also

External links

Indo-European

Indoevropeistika | Indogermanistik | 印欧語学

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Indo-European studies".

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