Happy 219th birthday, PIE!
On February 2, 1786, Sir William Jones made the following statement at the Founders' Dinner of the Oriental Society:
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 in 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....Thus, comparative Indo-European linguistics got its start, though WJ himself did not coin the term IE, and he was not interested in such endeavors himself.
3 Comments:
That Jones gets all the credit is unfair. I once read an introductory handbook (which, precisely, I have forgetten, but it was neither Lehmann’s nor Szereményi’s) which gave a list of earlier thinkers of the 18th century who had found similar connections.
But anyway, this is just an excuse for me to present myself and express my pleasure at finding a new blog about IE. I am an undergraduate at Loyola University Chicago double-majoring in Classical Greek and Latin, and I hope to move on to graduate study in comparative Indo-European linguistics before ultimately settling in the field of comparative Uralic linguists. While we have one Indo-Europeist at LUC, the majority of the Classics faculty are uninterested in or even hostile to comparative linguistics, and I'm the only student interested in IE at LUC, so it's lonely here. I envy you, who are studying in a much more supportive environment.
It is great to see a new source for news and trivia on IE. I myself once had such a weblog, Νεφελοκοκκyγία, but took it down early last fall.
Hi Christopher! I'm glad you introduced yourself. It's always fun to find more undergrads who are interested in IE. I'm the only one around here, too.
As long as undergrads are introducing themselves... I am one of that sort at Penn, majoring in Classics but taking a bunch of more, erm, peripheral courses. As regards the Near East I'm more familiar with Sumerian but I've a smattering of Hittite and Akkadian...
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