Jean-Paul Demoule

"The Search for a Long-anticipated Discovery The history of Indo-European studies reads with all the straightforward clarity of a family saga, with its founding fathers, child prodigies and even misguided sons. It also forms part of the catalogue of great scientific sagas, on a par with the discovery of penicillin, gravity and electricity. Of all the discoveries claimed by the social sciences, it is probably one of the few that the "hard" sciences (i.e. sciences concerned with physical matter and nature) are willing to acknowledge. Not only was the recognition of resemblances between the languages that we now term "Indo-European" an achievement in its own right, but the comparative grammar of these languages became the foundation on which general linguistics was gradually constructed as a scholarly discipline over the course of the 19th century: indeed, it is the only social science to have developed, and successfully applied, widely recognized mathematical models, much to the envy and fascination of other social sciences. As early as the mid-19th century, the German grammarian Schleicher made specific reference to Darwin in the construction of his family tree of Indo-European languages. In parallel, biologists taking this biologically-inspired tree at face value are today attempting to uncover traces of the Indo-European migrations hidden deep within the human genome. The Indo-European Golden Legend The saga had its pioneers, those who at the end of the 18th century had the intuitive genius to spot relationships between languages, initially by comparing Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. The best known of these pioneers was Sir William Jones who, in the 19th century, inspired three generations of mainly German linguists. The first generation was led by the German Franz Bopp (from 1816), and the Dane Rasmus Rask (from 1818), who defined the principles and tools of comparative grammar and who extended the corpus to include all Indo-European language families (Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Baltic, Persian, Armenian, Albanian). The second generation was that of August Schleicher, who was the first to construct a family tree of these languages based on the natural sciences model (in 1861, only two years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species); he was also the first to write a short fable in the reconstructed "primordial language" (Ursprache) . And finally, the generation of Leipzig "Neo-Grammarians" who, deeming the methods of their predecessors insufficiently rigorous, defined a corpus of phonetic laws capable of explaining both the evolution and reconstruction of languages, laws "that would not tolerate any exceptions". Out of this century of German scholarship would emerge an etymological dictionary of Indo-European (initiated by Wahlde) and a comparative grammar of Indo-European languages (by Brugmann and Delbrück), two key tools that still remain indispensable to this day"--

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