Indo-European studies
Encyclopedia
Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics
dealing with Indo-European languages
, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language
from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European
(PIE), and its speakers, the Proto-Indo-Europeans
, including their society and religion. The studies cover where the language originated and how it spread. This article also lists Indo-European scholars, centres, journals and book series.
was formally developed in the 19th century and applied first to Indo-European languages. The existence of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had been inferred by comparative 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 was reached about the internal groups of the IE family.
is used to compare patterns within one dialect
, 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.
(469-399 BC), the ancient Greeks were aware that their language had changed since the time of Homer
(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. There were also linguistic traditions in Mesopotamia and India; wrote a detailed grammar of Sanskrit in the 4th century BC.
In the post-classical West, languages studies were undermined by the naive attempt to derive all languages from Hebrew since the time of Saint Augustine. Prior studies classified the European languages as Japhetic
. One of the first scholars to challenge the idea of a Hebrew root to the languages of Europe was Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609). He identified Greek, Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages groups by comparing the word for "God" in various European languages. In 1710, Leibniz applied ideas of gradualism
and uniformitarianism
to linguistics. 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.
Around the 12th century, similarities between European languages became recognised. In Iceland, scholars noted the resemblances between Icelandic and English. Gerald of Wales claimed that Welsh
, Cornish
, and Breton
were descendants of a common source. A study of the Insular Celtic languages was carried out by George Buchanan
in the 16th century and the first field study was by Edward Lluyd around 1700. He published his work in 1707, shortly after publishing a translation of a study by Pezron on Breton.
Dante
(1265–1321) was aware of the fact that the Romance languages
were related. 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.
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.
proposed the existence of a primitive common language he called "Scythian". He included in its descendants Dutch, Greek, Latin, Persian and German, and in a posthumous publication of 1654 added Slavic, Celtic and Baltic. The 1647 publication discusses, as a first, the methodological issues in assigning languages to genetic groups. For example, he observed that loanwords should be eliminated in comparative studies, and also correctly put great emphasis on common morphological systems and irregularity as indicators of relationship. A few years earlier, Johann Elichmann already used the expression ex eadem origine (from a common source) in a 1640 study relating European languages to Indo-Iranian.
The concept of actually reconstructing an Indo-European proto-language was suggested by William Wotton
in 1713, while showing, among others, that Icelandic ("Teutonic'), the Romance languages, and Greek were related.
Mikhail Lomonosov
compared numbers and other linguistic features in different languages of the world including Slavic, Baltic ("Kurlandic"), Iranian ("Medic"), Finnish, Chinese, "Hottentot", and others. He emphatically expressed the antiquity of the linguistic stages accessible to comparative method in the drafts for his Russian Grammar published in 1755:
Despite the above, the discovery of the genetic relationship of the whole family of Indo-European languages is often attributed to Sir William Jones
, a British judge in India
who in a 1786 lecture (published 1788) observed that
In his 1786 The Sanscrit Language, Jones postulated a proto-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 included Egyptian
, Japanese
and Chinese
in the Indo-European languages, while omitting Hindi
.
In 1814 the young Dane Rasmus 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 a different family, and that "Greenlandic" (Kalaallisut
) represented yet a third. 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 extinct common source Jones 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 in Franz Bopp
's Comparative Grammar of 1833.
's 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmann
's Grundriss published from the 1880s. Brugmann's junggrammatische re-evaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussure
's proposal of the concept of "consonantal schwa" (which later evolved into 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 barely noticed except as a clever analysis, became mainstream after the 1927 discovery by Jerzy Kuryłowicz of the survival of at least some of these hypothetical phonemes in Anatolian. Julius Pokorny
in 1959 published his Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch
, an updated and slimmed-down reworking of the three-volume Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der indogermanischen Sprachen of Alois Walde and Julius Pokorny (1927–32). 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 as Oswald Szemerényi
, Calvert Watkins
, Warren Cowgill
, 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 verbs
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 http://www.indogermanistik.uni-freiburg.de/projekt.html. 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 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.
Some concepts of Indo-European studies also influenced the Nazis. (See Aryan Race
). In the period after World War II, several Indo-European scholars (e.g. Roger Pearson
, Jean Haudry
and the influential Georges Dumézil
) and writers influenced by Indo-European studies (e.g. Alain de Benoist
) were accused of having sympathies for Fascism or Nazism, and it was alleged that their political beliefs may have influenced their studies. Arvidsson speculated that the fact that many Indo-European scholars identify themselves as the descendants of the ancient Indo-Europeans may explain why the field of Indo-European studies has also been ideologically abused. Anthony remarked that "Indo-European linguistics and archaeology have been exploited to support openly ideological agendas for so long that a brief history of the issue quickly becomes entangled with the intellectual history of Europe."
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
).
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
dealing with Indo-European languages
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language
Proto-language
A proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead.Often the proto-language is not known directly...
from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
(PIE), and its speakers, the Proto-Indo-Europeans
Proto-Indo-Europeans
The Proto-Indo-Europeans were the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language , a reconstructed prehistoric language of Eurasia.Knowledge of them comes chiefly from the linguistic reconstruction, along with material evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics...
, including their society and religion. The studies cover where the language originated and how it spread. This article also lists Indo-European scholars, centres, journals and book series.
Use of comparative linguistics
The Comparative methodComparative method
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...
was formally developed in the 19th century and applied first to Indo-European languages. The existence of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had been inferred by comparative linguistics
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
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 was reached about the internal groups of the IE family.
Use of mass comparison
Using the method of Mass comparison, the IE languages are sometimes considered to be part of super-families such as Nostratic or Eurasiatic.Use of internal reconstruction
The method of internal reconstructionInternal reconstruction
Internal reconstruction is a method of recovering information about a language's past from the characteristics of the language at a later date...
is used to compare patterns within one dialect
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
, 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.
Preliminary work
By the time of SocratesSocrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
(469-399 BC), the ancient Greeks were aware that their language had changed since the time of Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
(about 730 BC). Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
(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. There were also linguistic traditions in Mesopotamia and India; wrote a detailed grammar of Sanskrit in the 4th century BC.
In the post-classical West, languages studies were undermined by the naive attempt to derive all languages from Hebrew since the time of Saint Augustine. Prior studies classified the European languages as Japhetic
Japhetic
Japhetic is a term that refers to the supposed descendants of Japheth, one of the three sons of Noah in the Bible. It corresponds to Semitic and Hamitic...
. One of the first scholars to challenge the idea of a Hebrew root to the languages of Europe was Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609). He identified Greek, Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages groups by comparing the word for "God" in various European languages. In 1710, Leibniz applied ideas of gradualism
Gradualism
Gradualism is the belief in or the policy of advancing toward a goal by gradual, often slow stages.-Politics and society:In politics, the concept of gradualism is used to describe the belief that change ought to be brought about in small, discrete increments rather than in abrupt strokes such as...
and uniformitarianism
Uniformitarianism
In the philosophy of naturalism, the uniformitarianism assumption is that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It has included the gradualistic concept that "the present is the...
to linguistics. 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.
Around the 12th century, similarities between European languages became recognised. In Iceland, scholars noted the resemblances between Icelandic and English. Gerald of Wales claimed that Welsh
Welsh language
Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
, Cornish
Cornish language
Cornish is a Brythonic Celtic language and a recognised minority language of the United Kingdom. Along with Welsh and Breton, it is directly descended from the ancient British language spoken throughout much of Britain before the English language came to dominate...
, and Breton
Breton language
Breton is a Celtic language spoken in Brittany , France. Breton is a Brythonic language, descended from the Celtic British language brought from Great Britain to Armorica by migrating Britons during the Early Middle Ages. Like the other Brythonic languages, Welsh and Cornish, it is classified as...
were descendants of a common source. A study of the Insular Celtic languages was carried out by George Buchanan
George Buchanan
George Buchanan may refer to:*George Buchanan , Scottish humanist*Sir George Buchanan , Scottish soldier during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms*Sir George Buchanan , Chief Medical Officer...
in the 16th century and the first field study was by Edward Lluyd around 1700. He published his work in 1707, shortly after publishing a translation of a study by Pezron on Breton.
Dante
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
(1265–1321) was aware of the fact that the Romance languages
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
were related. 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.
In the 16th century, visitors to India became aware of similarities between Indian and European languages. For example, Filippo Sassetti
Filippo Sassetti
Filippo Sassetti was a Florentine merchant who was born in Florence, Italy in 1540. Sassetti travelled to the Indian subcontinent and was among the first European observers to study the ancient Indian language, Sanskrit. Writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian...
reported striking resemblances between Sanskrit and Italian.
Early Indo-European studies
In a publication of 1647, Marcus Zuerius van BoxhornMarcus Zuerius van Boxhorn
Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn was a Dutch scholar . Born in Bergen op Zoom, he was professor at the University of Leiden. He discovered the similarity among Indo-European languages, and supposed the existence of a primitive common language which he called 'Scythian'...
proposed the existence of a primitive common language he called "Scythian". He included in its descendants Dutch, Greek, Latin, Persian and German, and in a posthumous publication of 1654 added Slavic, Celtic and Baltic. The 1647 publication discusses, as a first, the methodological issues in assigning languages to genetic groups. For example, he observed that loanwords should be eliminated in comparative studies, and also correctly put great emphasis on common morphological systems and irregularity as indicators of relationship. A few years earlier, Johann Elichmann already used the expression ex eadem origine (from a common source) in a 1640 study relating European languages to Indo-Iranian.
The concept of actually reconstructing an Indo-European proto-language was suggested by William Wotton
William Wotton
William Wotton was an English scholar, chiefly remembered for his remarkable abilities in learning languages and for his involvement in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. In Wales he is remembered as the collector and first translator of the ancient Welsh laws.-Early years:William Wotton...
in 1713, while showing, among others, that Icelandic ("Teutonic'), the Romance languages, and Greek were related.
Mikhail Lomonosov
Mikhail Lomonosov
Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was a Russian polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science. Among his discoveries was the atmosphere of Venus. His spheres of science were natural science, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, history, art,...
compared numbers and other linguistic features in different languages of the world including Slavic, Baltic ("Kurlandic"), Iranian ("Medic"), Finnish, Chinese, "Hottentot", and others. He emphatically expressed the antiquity of the linguistic stages accessible to comparative method in the drafts for his Russian Grammar published in 1755:
- Imagine the depth of time when these languages separated! ... Polish and Russian separated so long ago! Now think how long ago [this happened to] Kurlandic! Think when [this happened to] Latin, Greek, German, and Russian! Oh, great antiquity!
Despite the above, the discovery of the genetic relationship of the whole family of Indo-European languages is often attributed to Sir William Jones
William Jones (philologist)
Sir William Jones was an English philologist and scholar of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among Indo-European languages...
, a British judge in India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
who in a 1786 lecture (published 1788) 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."
In his 1786 The Sanscrit Language, Jones postulated a proto-language
Proto-language
A proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead.Often the proto-language is not known directly...
uniting six branches - Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
(i.e. Indo-Aryan
Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages constitutes a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family...
), Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
(i.e. Iranian
Iranian languages
The Iranian languages form a subfamily of the Indo-Iranian languages which in turn is a subgroup of Indo-European language family. They have been and are spoken by Iranian peoples....
), Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, Germanic
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
and Celtic
Celtic languages
The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family...
. In many ways his work was less accurate than his predecessors', as he erroneously included Egyptian
Egyptian language
Egyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the...
, Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
and Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
in the Indo-European languages, while omitting Hindi
Hindi
Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
.
In 1814 the young Dane Rasmus Christian Rask
Rasmus Christian Rask
Rasmus Rask was a Danish scholar and philologist.-Biography:...
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 a different family, and that "Greenlandic" (Kalaallisut
Kalaallisut language
Greenlandic is an Eskimo–Aleut language spoken by about 57,000 people in Greenland. It is closely related to the Inuit languages in Canada, such as Inuktitut...
) represented yet a third. 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
August Schleicher
August Schleicher was a German linguist. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language...
was the first scholar to compose a tentative reconstructed text in the extinct common source Jones had predicted (see: Schleicher's fable
Schleicher's fable
Schleicher's fable is an artificial text composed in the reconstructed language Proto-Indo-European , published by August Schleicher in 1868. Schleicher was the first scholar to compose a text in PIE. The fable is entitled Avis akvāsas ka...
). The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
(PIE) represents, by definition, the common language of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. This early phase culminates in Franz Bopp
Franz Bopp
Franz Bopp was a German linguist known for extensive comparative work on Indo-European languages.-Biography:...
's Comparative Grammar of 1833.
Later Indo-European studies
The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from Bopp to August SchleicherAugust Schleicher
August Schleicher was a German linguist. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language...
's 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmann
Karl Brugmann
Karl Brugmann was a German linguist. He is a towering figure in Indo-European linguistics.-Biography:He was educated at Halle and Leipzig. He was instructor in the gymnasium at Wiesbaden and at Leipzig, and in 1872-77 was assistant at the Russian Institute of Classical Philology at the latter place...
's Grundriss published from the 1880s. Brugmann's junggrammatische re-evaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
's proposal of the concept of "consonantal schwa" (which later evolved into the laryngeal theory
Laryngeal theory
The laryngeal theory is a generally accepted theory of historical linguistics which proposes the existence of one, or a set of three , consonant sounds termed "laryngeals" that appear in most current reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language...
) 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
Anatolian languages
The Anatolian languages comprise a group of extinct Indo-European languages that were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language.-Origins:...
and Tocharian
Tocharian languages
Tocharian or Tokharian is an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family. The name is taken from the people known to the Greeks as the Tocharians . These are sometimes identified with the Yuezhi and the Kushans. The term Tokharistan usually refers to 1st millennium Bactria, which the...
branches unknown in the 19th century, into the Indo-European framework.
Notably, the laryngeal theory
Laryngeal theory
The laryngeal theory is a generally accepted theory of historical linguistics which proposes the existence of one, or a set of three , consonant sounds termed "laryngeals" that appear in most current reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language...
, in its early forms barely noticed except as a clever analysis, became mainstream after the 1927 discovery by Jerzy Kuryłowicz of the survival of at least some of these hypothetical phonemes in Anatolian. Julius Pokorny
Julius Pokorny
Julius Pokorny was an Austrian linguist and scholar of the Celtic languages, particularly Irish, and a supporter of Irish nationalism. He held academic posts in Austrian and German universities.-Life:...
in 1959 published his Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch
Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch
The Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch was published in 1959 by the Austrian-German comparative linguist and Celtic languages expert Julius Pokorny...
, an updated and slimmed-down reworking of the three-volume Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der indogermanischen Sprachen of Alois Walde and Julius Pokorny (1927–32). 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 as Oswald Szemerényi
Oswald Szemerényi
Oswald John Louis Szemerényi was a Hungarian Indo-Europeanist with strong interests in comparative linguistics in general....
, Calvert Watkins
Calvert Watkins
Calvert Watkins is a professor Emeritus of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and professor-in-residence at UCLA.His doctoral dissertation, Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb I...
, Warren Cowgill
Warren Cowgill
Warren Cowgill was a professor of linguistics at Yale University and the Encyclopædia Britannica’s authority on Indo-European linguistics. He was unusual among Indo-European linguists of his time in believing that Indo-European should be classified as a branch of Indo-Hittite, with Hittite as a...
, Jochem Schindler
Jochem Schindler
Jochem Schindler was an Austrian Indo-Europeanist. In spite of his comparatively thin bibliography, he made important contributions, in particular to the theory of Proto-Indo-European language nominal inflection and ablaut.-References:*Eichner Compositiones Indogermanicae in memoriam Jochem...
, Helmut Rix
Helmut Rix
Helmut Rix was a German linguist and professor of the Sprachwissenschaftliches Seminar of Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany....
, developed a better understanding of morphology and, in the wake of Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophonie, ablaut
Indo-European ablaut
In linguistics, ablaut is a system of apophony in Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages...
. The Lexicon of the Indo-European verbs
Lexikon der Indogermanischen Verben
The Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben is an etymological dictionary of the Proto-Indo-European verb. The first edition appeared in 1998, edited by Helmut Rix. A second edition followed in 2001. The book is based on the Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch by Julius Pokorny...
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 http://www.indogermanistik.uni-freiburg.de/projekt.html. 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 to allow it influence the image of the proto-language, see also Indo-Hittite
Indo-Hittite
In Indo-European linguistics, the term Indo-Hittite refers to Sturtevant's 1926 hypothesis that the Anatolian languages may have split off the Proto-Indo-European language considerably earlier than the separation of the remaining Indo-European languages...
.
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
Kurgan hypothesis
The Kurgan hypothesis is one of the proposals about early Indo-European origins, which postulates that the people of an archaeological "Kurgan culture" in the Pontic steppe were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language...
. J. P. Mallory's 1997 Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture
Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture
The Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture is an encyclopedia of Indo-European studies and the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The encyclopedia was edited by J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams and published in 1997 by Fitzroy Dearborn...
gives an overview of this. These speculations about the realia
Realia
Realia may refer to:* Realia * Realia * Realia...
of Proto-Indo-European culture are however not part of the field of comparative linguistics, but rather a sister-discipline.
Some concepts of Indo-European studies also influenced the Nazis. (See Aryan Race
Aryan race
The Aryan race is a concept historically influential in Western culture in the period of the late 19th century and early 20th century. It derives from the idea that the original speakers of the Indo-European languages and their descendants up to the present day constitute a distinctive race or...
). In the period after World War II, several Indo-European scholars (e.g. Roger Pearson
Roger Pearson
Roger Pearson is a British anthropologist, conservationist, eugenics advocate, founder of the Neo Nazi organization Northern League, and publisher of several journals.-Life and work:...
, Jean Haudry
Jean Haudry
Jean Haudry is a linguist, and a founder of the Institut d'études indo-européennes at the Jean Moulin University Lyon 3 with Jean-Paul Allard and Jean Varenne. Under his leadership the Institut published, between 1982 and 1998, the Études indo-européennes...
and the influential Georges Dumézil
Georges Dumézil
Georges Dumézil was a French comparative philologist best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society...
) and writers influenced by Indo-European studies (e.g. Alain de Benoist
Alain de Benoist
Alain de Benoist is a French academic, philosopher, a founder of the Nouvelle Droite and head of the French think tank GRECE. Benoist is a critic of liberalism, free markets and egalitarianism.-Biography:...
) were accused of having sympathies for Fascism or Nazism, and it was alleged that their political beliefs may have influenced their studies. Arvidsson speculated that the fact that many Indo-European scholars identify themselves as the descendants of the ancient Indo-Europeans may explain why the field of Indo-European studies has also been ideologically abused. Anthony remarked that "Indo-European linguistics and archaeology have been exploited to support openly ideological agendas for so long that a brief history of the issue quickly becomes entangled with the intellectual history of Europe."
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
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
. Purely linguistic research was assisted by attempts to reconstruct the culture and religion of the Proto-Indo-Europeans by scholars such as Georges Dumézil
Georges Dumézil
Georges Dumézil was a French comparative philologist best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society...
, as well as by archaeology (e. g. Marija Gimbutas
Marija Gimbutas
Marija Gimbutas , was a Lithuanian-American archeologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe", a term she introduced. Her works published between 1946 and 1971 introduced new views by combining traditional spadework with linguistics and mythological...
, Colin Renfrew) and genetics (e. g. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza is an Italian population geneticist born in Genoa, who has been a professor at Stanford University since 1970 .-Books:...
).
Journals
- Kuhn's Zeitschrift KZ since 1852, in 1988 renamed to Historische SprachforschungHistorische SprachforschungHistorische Sprachforschung is an annual peer-reviewed academic journal covering Indo-European historical linguistics. It was established by Adalbert Kuhn in 1852 as the Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung and obtained its present title in 1988...
HS - Indogermanische ForschungenIndogermanische ForschungenIndogermanische Forschungen is a peer-reviewed academic journal of linguistics. It focuses primarily on Indo-European studies, but also publishes contributions on other languages and linguistic fields. It was established in 1892 by Karl Brugmann and Wilhelm Streitberg, and is presently published...
IF since 1892 - Glotta since 1909
- Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de ParisBulletin de la Société de Linguistique de ParisThe Société de Linguistique de Paris publishes the Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris. The journal contains two separate volumes: one presenting articles on all linguistic domains and on all language families, none excluded; The second...
BSL - Die SpracheDie SpracheDie Sprache is a peer-reviewed academic journal that was established in 1949. It contains articles on historical and comparative linguistics, especially of Indo-European languages...
since 1949 - Münchner Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft MSS 1952–
- Journal of Indo-European studiesJournal of Indo-European StudiesThe Journal of Indo-European Studies is a peer-reviewed academic journal of Indo-European studies, founded in 1973 by Roger Pearson. It publishes papers in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, mythology and philology relating to the cultural history of the Indo-European speaking peoples. The...
JIES since 1973 - Tocharian and Indo-European StudiesTocharian and Indo-European StudiesTocharian and Indo-European Studies is a scholarly journal on Tocharian in the Indo-European context, established in 1987 by the Icelandic linguist Jörundur Hilmarsson...
since 1987 - Studia indo-europaea since 2001
- International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics and Linguistic Reconstruction IJDL MunichMunichMunich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
since 2004
Book series
- Leiden Studies in Indo-EuropeanLeiden Studies in Indo-EuropeanLeiden Studies in Indo-European is an academic book series on Indo-European studies.The series was founded in 1991 and is published by Rodopi. -Volumes:Volumes include:...
founded 1991 - Copenhagen Studies in Indo-EuropeanCopenhagen Studies in Indo-EuropeanCopenhagen Studies in Indo-European is an academic book series on Indo-European studies and related subjects.The series was founded in 1999 and is published by Museum Tusculanum Press. Its chief editor is Jens Elmegård Rasmussen.-Volumes:...
founded 1999 - Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series founded 2005
Contemporary IE study centres
The following universities have institutes or faculties devoted to IE studies:  Austria |
Innsbruck http://info.uibk.ac.at/c/c6/c604/ Salzburg University of Salzburg The University of Salzburg, or Paris Lodron University after its founder, the Prince Archbishop Paris Lodron, is located in the Austrian city of Salzburg, Salzburgerland, home of Mozart. It is divided into 4 faculties: catholic theology, law, humanities and natural science.Founded in 1622, it... http://www.sbg.ac.at/spr/home.htm Vienna University of Vienna The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world... http://www.univie.ac.at/indogermanistik/ |
 Czech Republic |
Charles University in Prague Charles University in Prague Charles University in Prague is the oldest and largest university in the Czech Republic. Founded in 1348, it was the first university in Central Europe and is also considered the earliest German university... http://enlil.ff.cuni.cz/ |
 Denmark |
Copenhagen University of Copenhagen The University of Copenhagen is the oldest and largest university and research institution in Denmark. Founded in 1479, it has more than 37,000 students, the majority of whom are female , and more than 7,000 employees. The university has several campuses located in and around Copenhagen, with the... http://www.humanist.ku.dk/studier/beskrivelser/Indoeuropaeisk/default.htm, http://indoeuropaeisk.ku.dk, http://rootsofeurope.ku.dk |
 Germany |
Bonn University of Bonn The University of Bonn is a public research university located in Bonn, Germany. Founded in its present form in 1818, as the linear successor of earlier academic institutions, the University of Bonn is today one of the leading universities in Germany. The University of Bonn offers a large number... http://www.indogermanistik.uni-bonn.de/index.htm Cologne University of Cologne The University of Cologne is one of the oldest universities in Europe and, with over 44,000 students, one of the largest universities in Germany. The university is part of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, an association of Germany's leading research universities... http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/ifl/ Dresden Dresden University of Technology The Technische Universität Dresden is the largest institute of higher education in the city of Dresden, the largest university in Saxony and one of the 10 largest universities in Germany with 36,066 students... http://www.tu-dresden.de/slk/tischler/home.htm Erlangen http://www.indogermanistik.phil.uni-erlangen.de/ Frankfurt am Main http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/ Free University of Berlin Free University of Berlin Freie Universität Berlin is one of the leading and most prestigious research universities in Germany and continental Europe. It distinguishes itself through its modern and international character. It is the largest of the four universities in Berlin. Research at the university is focused on the... http://web.fu-berlin.de/indogermanistik Freiburg University of Freiburg The University of Freiburg , sometimes referred to in English as the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, is a public research university located in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.The university was founded in 1457 by the Habsburg dynasty as the... http://www.indogermanistik.uni-freiburg.de/ Göttingen http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~uhsw/ Hamburg University of Hamburg The University of Hamburg is a university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by Wilhelm Stern and others. It grew out of the previous Allgemeines Vorlesungswesen and the Kolonialinstitut as well as the Akademisches Gymnasium. There are around 38,000 students as of the start of... http://www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/IPhASI/index.htm Halle University of Halle-Wittenberg The Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg , also referred to as MLU, is a public, research-oriented university in the cities of Halle and Wittenberg within Saxony-Anhalt, Germany... http://www.indogerm.uni-halle.de/ Heidelberg http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/institute/fak9/INDOG/Humboldt University of Berlin Humboldt University of Berlin The Humboldt University of Berlin is Berlin's oldest university, founded in 1810 as the University of Berlin by the liberal Prussian educational reformer and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose university model has strongly influenced other European and Western universities... http://www2.hu-berlin.de/indogermanistik/Jena http://ulblin01.thulb.uni-jena.de/indogermanistik/ Marburg http://www.uni-marburg.de/ios/sprachwissenschaft/welcome.html Munich http://www.indogermanistik.lmu.de/index.htm Münster University of Münster The University of Münster is a public university located in the city of Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. The WWU is part of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, a society of Germany's leading research universities... http://www.uni-muenster.de/Indogermanistik/ Regensburg University of Regensburg The University of Regensburg is a public research university located in the medieval city of Regensburg, Bavaria, a city that is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university was founded on July 18, 1962 by the Landtag of Bavaria as the fourth full-fledged university in Bavaria... http://www-zope.uni-regensburg.de:8080/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_IV/Indogermanistik/ Würzburg University of Würzburg The University of Würzburg is a university in Würzburg, Germany, founded in 1402. The university is a member of the distinguished Coimbra Group.-Name:... http://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/vergl-sprachwiss/idg.html |
 Italy |
Universita degli Studi di Padova |
 Netherlands |
Leiden Leiden University Leiden University , located in the city of Leiden, is the oldest university in the Netherlands. The university was founded in 1575 by William, Prince of Orange, leader of the Dutch Revolt in the Eighty Years' War. The royal Dutch House of Orange-Nassau and Leiden University still have a close... http://www.indo-europees.leidenuniv.nl/ http://www.indo-european.nl/ |
 Poland |
Jagiellonian University Jagiellonian University The Jagiellonian University was established in 1364 by Casimir III the Great in Kazimierz . It is the oldest university in Poland, the second oldest university in Central Europe and one of the oldest universities in the world.... http://www.filg.uj.edu.pl/kjoie/ |
 Slovenia |
Ljubljana University of Ljubljana The University of Ljubljana is the oldest and largest university in Slovenia. With 64,000 enrolled graduate and postgraduate students, it is among the largest universities in Europe.-Beginnings:... http://spj.ff.uni-lj.si/ |
 Spain |
Madrid Complutense University of Madrid The Complutense University of Madrid is a university in Madrid, and one of the oldest universities in the world. It is located on a sprawling campus that occupies the entirety of the Ciudad Universitaria district of Madrid, with annexes in the district of Somosaguas in the neighboring city of... http://www.filol.ucm.es/dept/filgr/ Salamanca University of Salamanca The University of Salamanca is a Spanish higher education institution, located in the town of Salamanca, west of Madrid. It was founded in 1134 and given the Royal charter of foundation by King Alfonso IX in 1218. It is the oldest founded university in Spain and the third oldest European... http://clasicas.usal.es/ |
 Sweden |
Uppsala Uppsala University Uppsala University is a research university in Uppsala, Sweden, and is the oldest university in Scandinavia, founded in 1477. It consistently ranks among the best universities in Northern Europe in international rankings and is generally considered one of the most prestigious institutions of... http://www.lingfil.uu.se/afro/jamforande/jamfindex.html |
 Switzerland |
Basel University of Basel The University of Basel is located in Basel, Switzerland, and is considered to be one of leading universities in the country... http://pages.unibas.ch/klaphil/idg/home.html Bern http://www.isw.unibe.ch/lenya/isw/live/index.html Lausanne University of Lausanne The University of Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland was founded in 1537 as a school of theology, before being made a university in 1890. Today about 12,000 students and 2200 researchers study and work at the university... http://www.unine.ch/antic/lingcomp.html Neuchâtel University of Neuchâtel The University of Neuchâtel is a French-speaking university in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. The University has five faculties and more than a dozen institutes, including arts and human sciences, natural sciences, law, economics and theology. The Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences is the largest... http://www2.unine.ch/linguistique/page3939.html Zürich University of Zurich The University of Zurich , located in the city of Zurich, is the largest university in Switzerland, with over 25,000 students. It was founded in 1833 from the existing colleges of theology, law, medicine and a new faculty of philosophy.... http://www.indoger.unizh.ch/ |
 United Kingdom |
Oxford University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096... http://www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/ |
 United States |
Cornell Cornell University Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions... http://ling.cornell.edu/ Harvard Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country... http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~lingdept/index.html Los Angeles University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses... http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/pies/home.html Texas University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin... http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc/ARD.html |
Origin of the term
The term Indo-European itself now current in English literature, was coined in 1813 by the British scholar Sir Thomas YoungThomas Young (scientist)
Thomas Young was an English polymath. He is famous for having partly deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics before Jean-François Champollion eventually expanded on his work...
, 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. Among the other names suggested were:
(C. Malte-Brun, 1810)
- Indoeuropean (Th. Young, 1813) (Rasmus C. Rask, 1815) (F. Schmitthenner, 1826) (Wilhelm von HumboldtWilhelm von HumboldtFriedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt was a German philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of Humboldt Universität. He is especially remembered as a linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy of language and to the theory and practice...
, 1827) (A. F. Pott, 1840) (G. I. Ascoli, 1854) - Aryan (F. M. MüllerMax MüllerFriedrich Max Müller , more regularly known as Max Müller, was a German philologist and Orientalist, one of the founders of the western academic field of Indian studies and the discipline of comparative religion...
, 1861) (H. Chavée, 1867).
In English, Indo-German was used by J. C. Prichard in 1826 although he preferred Indo-European. In French, use of was established by A. Pictet (1836). In German literature, was used by Franz Bopp
Franz Bopp
Franz Bopp was a German linguist known for extensive comparative work on Indo-European languages.-Biography:...
since 1835, while the term had already been 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.
Today, Indo-European, is well established in English and French literature, while remains current in German literature, but alongside a growing number of uses of .
Indo-Hittite
Indo-Hittite
In Indo-European linguistics, the term Indo-Hittite refers to Sturtevant's 1926 hypothesis that the Anatolian languages may have split off the Proto-Indo-European language considerably earlier than the separation of the remaining Indo-European languages...
is sometimes used for the wider family including Anatolian by those who consider that IE and Anatolian are comparable separate branches.
See also
- Comparative methodComparative methodIn linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...
- Historical linguisticsHistorical linguisticsHistorical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
- Japhetic
- Proto-languageProto-languageA proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead.Often the proto-language is not known directly...