Indo-Semitic languages
Encyclopedia
Indo-Semitic is a theory that relates Indo-European
and Semitic
. This theory has never been widely accepted by linguists, though it has had some notable supporters.
The term "Indo-Semitic" was first used by Graziadio Ascoli
(Cuny 1943:1), a leading advocate of this relationship. Although this term has been used by several scholars since (e.g. Adams and Mallory 2006:83), there is no generally accepted term for this grouping at the present time. In German the term indogermanisch-semitisch, 'Indo-Germanic–Semitic', has often been used (as by Delitzsch 1873, Pedersen
1908), in which indogermanisch is a synonym of "Indo-European".
Several phases in the development of the Indo-Semitic hypothesis can be distinguished.
(1) In a first phase, a few scholars in the 19th century argued that the Indo-European languages
were related to the Semitic languages
. The first to do so was Johann Christoph Adelung
in his work Mithridates. However, the first to do so in a scientific way was Richard Lepsius
in 1836.
A succinct history of the Indo-Semitic hypothesis is provided by Alan S. Kaye (1985:887) in a review of Allan Bomhard
's Toward Proto-Nostratic:
According to Carleton T. Hodge (1998:318), a leading specialist of Afroasiatic, "The positing of a genetic connection between Indo-European and Semitic goes back at least as far as Richard Lepsius (1836)".
The arguments presented for a relationship between Indo-European and Semitic in the 19th century were commonly rejected by Indo-Europeanists, including W.D. Whitney
(1875) and August Schleicher
.
(2) In the mid-19th century, Friedrich Müller
argued that the Semitic languages were related to a large group of African languages, which he termed Hamitic
. This implied a larger grouping, Indo-European—Hamito-Semitic. However, the concept of Hamitic was deeply flawed, relying in part on racial criteria rather than linguistic ones. In 1950, Joseph Greenberg
showed that the Hamitic grouping needed to be split up, with only some of the languages it concerned groupable with Semitic. He named this greatly modified grouping Afroasiatic. In principle, then, Indo-European—Hamito-Semitic was replaced by Indo-European—Afroasiatic.
However, Greenberg also argued that the relevant question was not whether Indo-European was related to Afroasiatic but how it was related (2005:336-338). Did the two form a valid node in a family tree of languages, or were they only more distantly related, with many other languages in between? Since the 1980s, adherents of the controversial Nostratic
hypothesis, who accept a relationship between Indo-European and Afroasiatic, have begun to move away from the view that Indo-European and Afroasiatic share an especially close relationship, and to consider that they are only related at a higher level (ib. 332-333).
(3) Although it might seem that the logical connection to pursue was that between Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic or, later, Indo-European and Afroasiatic (ib. 336), in practice scholars interested in this comparison continued to compare Indo-European and Semitic directly (e.g. Möller 1911, Cuny 1943, Bomhard 1975, Levin 1995). One reason for this seems to be that the study of Semitic had progressed far beyond that of "Hamitic" or, later, Afroasiatic. According to Albert Cuny
(1943:2), who accepted the validity of the Hamito-Semitic grouping (ib. 3):
(4) A new departure was represented by the first installment of Vladislav Illich-Svitych
's Nostratic dictionary in 1971, edited after Illich-Svitych's untimely death by Vladimir Dybo
. Rather than comparing Indo-European to Semitic, Illich-Svitych compared it to Afroasiatic directly (Greenberg 2005:336), using his reconstruction of Afroasiatic phonology. This approach has been taken subsequently by other Nostraticists (e.g. Bomhard 2008).
(5) In the 1980s, some linguists, notably Joseph Greenberg and Sergei Starostin
, began to identify Afroasiatic as a language family considerably more ancient than Indo-European, directly related not to Indo-European but to an earlier grouping from which Indo-European was descended, which Greenberg termed Eurasiatic
. This view has been accepted by several Nostraticists, including Allan Bomhard (2008).
The Indo-Semitic hypothesis has thus undergone a paradigm shift
. From Lepsius in 1836 through the mid-20th century, the question asked was whether Indo-European and Semitic are related or unrelated, and in attempting to answer this question Indo-European and Semitic were compared directly. This now appears naive, and the relevant units of comparison to be Eurasiatic and Afroasiatic, the immediate precursors of Indo-European (controversially) and Semitic (uncontroversially). This revised schema still has a long road to go if it is to win general acceptance from the linguistic community.
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...
and Semitic
Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...
. This theory has never been widely accepted by linguists, though it has had some notable supporters.
The term "Indo-Semitic" was first used by Graziadio Ascoli
Graziadio Isaia Ascoli
Graziadio Isaia Ascoli was an Italian linguist.- Life and work :Ascoli was born in an Italian-speaking Jewish family in the multiethnic town of Gorizia, then part of the Austrian Empire...
(Cuny 1943:1), a leading advocate of this relationship. Although this term has been used by several scholars since (e.g. Adams and Mallory 2006:83), there is no generally accepted term for this grouping at the present time. In German the term indogermanisch-semitisch, 'Indo-Germanic–Semitic', has often been used (as by Delitzsch 1873, Pedersen
Holger Pedersen (linguist)
Holger Pedersen was a Danish linguist who made significant contributions to language science and wrote about 30 authoritative works concerning several languages....
1908), in which indogermanisch is a synonym of "Indo-European".
Several phases in the development of the Indo-Semitic hypothesis can be distinguished.
(1) In a first phase, a few scholars in the 19th century argued that the 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...
were related to the Semitic languages
Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...
. The first to do so was Johann Christoph Adelung
Johann Christoph Adelung
Johann Christoph Adelung was a German grammarian and philologist.He was born at Spantekow, in Western Pomerania, and educated at schools in Anklam and Berge Monastery, Magdeburg, and the University of Halle...
in his work Mithridates. However, the first to do so in a scientific way was Richard Lepsius
Karl Richard Lepsius
Karl Richard Lepsius was a pioneering Prussian Egyptologist and linguist and pioneer of modern archaeology.-Background:...
in 1836.
A succinct history of the Indo-Semitic hypothesis is provided by Alan S. Kaye (1985:887) in a review of Allan Bomhard
Allan R. Bomhard
Allan R. Bomhard is an American linguist.He was educated at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Hunter College, and the City University of New York, and served in the U.S. Army from 1964—1966. He currently resides in Charleston, SC...
's Toward Proto-Nostratic:
- A proposed relationship between Indo-European and Semitic goes back some 125 years to R. von RaumerRudolf von Raumer-Biography:He was born in Breslau . He was Privatdocent at the University of Erlangen from 1840, and professor there from 1876...
;1 but it was G.I. AscoliGraziadio Isaia AscoliGraziadio Isaia Ascoli was an Italian linguist.- Life and work :Ascoli was born in an Italian-speaking Jewish family in the multiethnic town of Gorizia, then part of the Austrian Empire...
who, after examining many items, declared in 1864 that these language families were genetically related. However, A. SchleicherAugust SchleicherAugust 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...
denied the relationship. Scholars waited for a systematic study of IE-Semitic vocabulary until 1873, when F. DelitzschFriedrich DelitzschFriedrich Delitzsch was a German Assyriologist. Born in Erlangen, he studied in Leipzig and Berlin, and in 1874 was habilitated as a lecturer of Semitic languages and Assyriology in Leipzig. In 1885 he became a "full professor" at Leipzig, and afterwards a professor at the Universities of Breslau ...
published his Studien über indogermanisch-semitische Wurzelverwandtschaft; this was followed in 1881 by J. McCurdy's Aryo-Semitic Speech. C. AbelCarl AbelCarl Abel was a German comparative philologist from Berlin who wrote Linguistic Essays in 1880. Abel also acted as Ilchester lecturer on comparative lexicography at the University of Oxford and as the Berlin correspondent of the Times and the Standard...
's 400-page dictionary of Egyptian-Semitic-IE roots appeared in 1884. Work by 20th century linguists who have investigated the problem more thoroughly with Afro-Asiatic and/or Semitic data include H. MöllerHermann MöllerHermann Möller was a Danish linguist noted for his work in favor of a genetic relationship between the Indo-European and Semitic language families and his version of the laryngeal theory....
, A. CunyAlbert CunyAlbert Cuny was a French linguist known for his attempts to establish phonological correspondences between the Indo-European and Semitic languages and for his contributions to the laryngeal theory....
(in a series of publications from 1912 through 1946, all used by Bomhard), L. Brunner, C. Hodge, S. Levin, A. Dolgopol′skijAharon DolgopolskyAharon Dolgopolsky is a Russian-born Israeli comparative linguist and one of the modern founders of comparative Nostratic linguistics.Born in Moscow, he arrived at the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis in the 1960s, at around the same time but independently of Vladislav Illich-Svitych...
, V.M. Illič-SvityčVladislav Illich-SvitychVladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych was a Russian linguist and accentologist, also a founding father of comparative Nostratic linguistics.Of Ukrainian descent, he was born in Kiev but later moved to work in Moscow. He resuscitated the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis, originally expounded by...
, and K. Koskinen.
-
- 1Some have gone back earlier, to LepsiusKarl Richard LepsiusKarl Richard Lepsius was a pioneering Prussian Egyptologist and linguist and pioneer of modern archaeology.-Background:...
1836.
- 1Some have gone back earlier, to Lepsius
According to Carleton T. Hodge (1998:318), a leading specialist of Afroasiatic, "The positing of a genetic connection between Indo-European and Semitic goes back at least as far as Richard Lepsius (1836)".
The arguments presented for a relationship between Indo-European and Semitic in the 19th century were commonly rejected by Indo-Europeanists, including W.D. Whitney
William Dwight Whitney
William Dwight Whitney was an American linguist, philologist, and lexicographer who edited The Century Dictionary.-Life:William Dwight Whitney was born in Northampton, Massachusetts on February 9, 1827. His father was Josiah Dwight Whitney of the New England Dwight family...
(1875) and 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...
.
(2) In the mid-19th century, Friedrich Müller
Friedrich Müller (linguist)
Friedrich Müller was an Austrian linguist and ethnologist who originated the term Hamito-Semitic languages for what are now called the Afro-Asiatic languages.-Biography:He studied at the University of Göttingen...
argued that the Semitic languages were related to a large group of African languages, which he termed Hamitic
Hamitic
Hamitic is an historical term for the peoples supposedly descended from Noah's son Ham, paralleling Semitic and Japhetic.It was formerly used for grouping the non-Semitic Afroasiatic languages , but since, unlike the Semitic branch, these have not been shown to form a phylogenetic unity, the term...
. This implied a larger grouping, Indo-European—Hamito-Semitic. However, the concept of Hamitic was deeply flawed, relying in part on racial criteria rather than linguistic ones. In 1950, Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg was a prominent and controversial American linguist, principally known for his work in two areas, linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.- Early life and career :...
showed that the Hamitic grouping needed to be split up, with only some of the languages it concerned groupable with Semitic. He named this greatly modified grouping Afroasiatic. In principle, then, Indo-European—Hamito-Semitic was replaced by Indo-European—Afroasiatic.
However, Greenberg also argued that the relevant question was not whether Indo-European was related to Afroasiatic but how it was related (2005:336-338). Did the two form a valid node in a family tree of languages, or were they only more distantly related, with many other languages in between? Since the 1980s, adherents of the controversial Nostratic
Nostratic languages
Nostratic is a proposed language family that includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, including the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic as well as Kartvelian languages...
hypothesis, who accept a relationship between Indo-European and Afroasiatic, have begun to move away from the view that Indo-European and Afroasiatic share an especially close relationship, and to consider that they are only related at a higher level (ib. 332-333).
(3) Although it might seem that the logical connection to pursue was that between Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic or, later, Indo-European and Afroasiatic (ib. 336), in practice scholars interested in this comparison continued to compare Indo-European and Semitic directly (e.g. Möller 1911, Cuny 1943, Bomhard 1975, Levin 1995). One reason for this seems to be that the study of Semitic had progressed far beyond that of "Hamitic" or, later, Afroasiatic. According to Albert Cuny
Albert Cuny
Albert Cuny was a French linguist known for his attempts to establish phonological correspondences between the Indo-European and Semitic languages and for his contributions to the laryngeal theory....
(1943:2), who accepted the validity of the Hamito-Semitic grouping (ib. 3):
(4) A new departure was represented by the first installment of Vladislav Illich-Svitych
Vladislav Illich-Svitych
Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych was a Russian linguist and accentologist, also a founding father of comparative Nostratic linguistics.Of Ukrainian descent, he was born in Kiev but later moved to work in Moscow. He resuscitated the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis, originally expounded by...
's Nostratic dictionary in 1971, edited after Illich-Svitych's untimely death by Vladimir Dybo
Vladimir Dybo
Vladimir Antonovich Dybo is a Russian linguist whose areas of research include the Slavic languages, Indo-European, Nostratic, and Nilo-Saharan....
. Rather than comparing Indo-European to Semitic, Illich-Svitych compared it to Afroasiatic directly (Greenberg 2005:336), using his reconstruction of Afroasiatic phonology. This approach has been taken subsequently by other Nostraticists (e.g. Bomhard 2008).
(5) In the 1980s, some linguists, notably Joseph Greenberg and Sergei Starostin
Sergei Starostin
Dr. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin was a Russian historical linguist and scholar, best known for his work with hypothetical proto-languages, including his work on the reconstruction of the Proto-Borean language, the controversial theory of Altaic languages and the formulation of the Dené–Caucasian...
, began to identify Afroasiatic as a language family considerably more ancient than Indo-European, directly related not to Indo-European but to an earlier grouping from which Indo-European was descended, which Greenberg termed Eurasiatic
Eurasiatic languages
Eurasiatic is a language macrofamily proposed by Joseph Greenberg that includes many language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia. The eight branches of Eurasiatic are Etruscan, Indo-European, Uralic–Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo–Aleut, spoken in...
. This view has been accepted by several Nostraticists, including Allan Bomhard (2008).
The Indo-Semitic hypothesis has thus undergone a paradigm shift
Paradigm shift
A Paradigm shift is, according to Thomas Kuhn in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , a change in the basic assumptions, or paradigms, within the ruling theory of science...
. From Lepsius in 1836 through the mid-20th century, the question asked was whether Indo-European and Semitic are related or unrelated, and in attempting to answer this question Indo-European and Semitic were compared directly. This now appears naive, and the relevant units of comparison to be Eurasiatic and Afroasiatic, the immediate precursors of Indo-European (controversially) and Semitic (uncontroversially). This revised schema still has a long road to go if it is to win general acceptance from the linguistic community.
Other works cited
- Adams, Douglas Q. and James Mallory. 2006. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 1950. "Studies in African linguistic classification: IV. Hamito-Semitic". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6.1, 47–63.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 2005. Genetic Linguistics: Essays on Theory and Method, edited by William Croft. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Whitney, William Dwight. 1875. The Life and Growth of Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
External links
- Friedrich Delitzsch German Wikipedia (includes bibliography)
- Rudolf von Raumer German Wikipedia (includes bibliographical and biographical links)