this I want to get. concerns my philology studies too. thanks!
KS
On 11/04/2008, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> London Review of Books, cover date 10 April 2008
>
> The Land East of the Asterisk
>
> Wendy Doniger on the Indo-Europeans
>
> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n07/doni01_.html
>
> Indo-European Poetry and Myth by M.L. West
>
> Nineteenth-century German and British linguists, building on some
> 18th-century hunches, uncovered the connections between members of a large
> (and rather dysfunctional) family of languages that included ancient Greek,
> Latin, Hittite (in ancient Anatolia), Vedic Sanskrit (in ancient India),
> Avestan (in ancient Iran), the Celtic and Norse-Germanic languages and,
> ultimately, French, German, Italian, Spanish, English and all their friends
> and relations.
>
> They called the family Indo-European or Indo-Germanic or Indo-Aryan, and
> assumed that, some time in the fourth millennium BCE, the single parent
> language, Proto-Indo-European (as easy as PIE), broke apart to give birth to
> the more ancient languages of the group, which continued to branch off into
> sub-groups.
>
> There are no attested examples of the parent language before the break-up;
> the Indo-European speakers almost certainly had no knowledge of writing, and
> the earliest example of any Indo-European language that we have is a
> 14th-century BCE Anatolian treaty in Hittite that calls on the Hittite
> version of several Vedic gods.
>
> The reconstructed, hypothetical forms of Indo-European therefore, are
> usually designated with an apologetic or apotropaic asterisk.
>
> Thus *H1ekwo-, for instance, or more simply *ekwos, the PIE word for
> horseš, yields the Latin equus, Gallic epos, Greek hippos, Sanskrit as´va,
> Old English eoh and so forth.
>
> Martin West, who has written what is surely the definitive book on
> Indo-European language and religion, states his case well...etc etc.
>
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