Indo-European studies

• 1. Introduction

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  Indo-European studies, known in German as Indogermanistik, sets out to rebuild a language that nobody ever wrote down. The field blends historical linguistics, comparative philology, archaeology and genetics. Its target is Proto-Indo-European, the shared ancestor of languages spoken from the Indian subcontinent to Europe, along with the homeland and society of the people who spoke it.

  In the drafts for his Russian Grammar, published in 1755, Mikhail Lomonosov asked readers to "Imagine the depth of time when these languages separated". He had set Slavic and Baltic beside Iranian, Finnish and even Chinese. He sensed that the differences between them had taken ages to build.

  This documentary asks who first suspected a hidden kinship among such different tongues. It asks why a family of languages could go without an agreed name for so long. And it asks how scholars test claims about a speech community that left no texts, and how far their evidence can reach beyond words.

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• 2. A Family Without a Name

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  In 1813 the British scholar Sir Thomas Young coined the term Indo-European. He meant it as a plain geographical label for languages spanning the Indian subcontinent and Europe. Nobody had agreed on a name at that point, and rival proposals kept arriving. Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn used scythisch in 1637, and C. Malte-Brun offered indo-germanique in 1810. Christian Lassen suggested arisch in 1830, and F. M. Müller proposed aryan in 1861.

  Rasmus Rask's japetisk of 1815 meant Japhetic languages, named for Japheth, a son of the biblical Noah. It paralleled Semitic, taken from Noah's son Shem, and Hamitic, from his son Ham. Japhetic and Hamitic are both obsolete now. Hamito-Semitic survives only as a dated name for the Afro-Asiatic languages.

  In 1823 Julius von Klapproth introduced the German term Indogermanisch, meant to cover both the northern and southern branches of the family. J.C. Prichard carried Indo-German into English in 1826, although he himself preferred Indo-European. A. Pictet fixed indo-européen in French in 1836. Franz Bopp had used Indoeuropäisch from 1835 onward.

  August Friedrich Pott later popularized Indo-Germanisch, reading it as a span from the easternmost branch to the westernmost. That reading set off unproductive arguments over whether Indo-Celtic or Tocharo-Celtic might fit better. Today Indo-European and indo-européen dominate English and French scholarship, while German writers mostly keep Indogermanisch, with Indoeuropäisch gaining ground. Dutch academics have largely moved from Indogermaans to Indo-Europees.

  Another label, Indo-Hittite, is used by those who treat Anatolian and the rest of Indo-European as two separate branches of equal rank.

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• 3. Doubts Before Discovery

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  Around 330 BC Aristotle sorted linguistic change into four kinds: insertion, deletion, transposition and substitution. The ancient Greeks already knew that their language had shifted since the time of Homer, about 730 BC. By the 1st century BC the Romans had noticed the similarities between Greek and Latin.

  Saint Augustine's era brought a setback. Under Christian influence, scholars in the post-classical West tried to derive every language from Hebrew, and earlier studies had labelled the European languages Japhetic. Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) was one of the first to challenge a Hebrew root. He compared the word for "God" across European languages and identified Greek, Germanic, Romance and Slavic groups.

  Around the 12th century, scholars began to notice resemblances among European tongues. In Iceland, writers observed the likeness between Icelandic and English. Gerald of Wales claimed that Welsh, Cornish and Breton descended from a common source. George Buchanan studied the Insular Celtic languages in the 16th century. Edward Lhuyd carried out the first field study around 1700 and published his work in 1707, shortly after translating a study of Breton by Paul-Yves Pezron.

  Grammars of European languages other than Latin and Classical Greek started appearing at the end of the 15th century, which invited comparison. In the 16th century, visitors to India noticed likenesses with European speech. Filippo Sassetti reported striking resemblances between Sanskrit and Italian, a clue that scholars would not follow up for generations.

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• 4. Scythian and Other Guesses

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  In his 1647 essay, Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn proposed a primitive common language that he called Scythian. He counted Dutch, German, Latin, Greek and Persian among its descendants. His Originum Gallicarum liber of 1654, published after his death, added Slavic, Celtic and Baltic. The 1647 essay was also the first to discuss how to assign languages to genetic groups. Boxhorn argued that loanwords should be removed from comparisons. He rightly stressed shared morphological systems and irregularities as signs of relationship.

  The Silesian physician Johann Elichmann (1601/02-1639) had reached for a similar idea a few years earlier. A study published after his death, in 1640, used the phrase ex eadem origine, meaning from a common source. He linked European languages to the Indo-Iranian group, which includes Sanskrit.

  The Hebrew theory refused to die. In 1674 Pierre Besnier (1648-1705) published a book, translated into English the next year, titled A philosophical essay for the reunion of the languages, or, the art of knowing all by the mastery of one.

  In 1710 Leibniz wrote a short essay applying gradualism and uniformitarianism to language. Like Scaliger, he rejected a Hebrew root. He also rejected the notion of unrelated language groups and held that all languages share one source. He proposed a Japhetic group, covering what we now call Indo-European, and contrasted it with the Aramaic languages, now generally called Semitic.

  William Wotton suggested in 1713 that a proto-language could actually be reconstructed. He showed that Icelandic, which he called Teutonic, the Romance languages and Greek were related. Yet in 1741 Gottfried Hensel (1687-1767) published a language map of the world in his Synopsis Universae Philologiae and still derived every language from Hebrew.

  Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux (1691-1779) sent a Mémoire to the French Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1767. It showed the similarity among Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, German and Russian. Even so, credit for the discovery usually goes to a British judge working in India.

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• 5. Jones, Rask and Bopp

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  Sir William Jones, the judge in question, gave a lecture in 1786 that was published in 1788. He called Sanskrit wonderfully structured and found its roots and grammar closer to Greek and Latin than accident could explain. In his words, "no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source". In The Sanskrit Language of 1786 he posited a proto-language joining six branches: Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Greek, Latin, Germanic and Celtic.

  In several ways his work was less accurate than that of his predecessors. He wrongly included Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese in the family and left out Hindi.

  The young Dane Rasmus Christian Rask entered an essay contest on Icelandic history in 1814. He concluded that the Germanic languages belong to one family with Greek, Latin, Slavic and Lithuanian. He doubted that Old Irish belonged, though he later changed his mind. He judged Finnish and Hungarian related to each other but in a different family, and placed Kalaallisut, which he called Greenlandic, in a third. At that stage he did not know Sanskrit. He learned it afterward and published some of the earliest Western work on ancient Iranian languages.

  August Schleicher was the first scholar to compose a tentative text in the lost common source that Boxhorn and later scholars had predicted. That text is known as Schleicher's fable. The reconstructed language became Proto-Indo-European, or PIE, defined as the common speech of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Franz Bopp's Comparative Grammar of 1833 brought this early phase to its peak, and the classical phase of the field grew directly out of it.

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• 6. Rebuilding the Lost Language

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  The classical phase of Indo-European comparison runs from Bopp to August Schleicher's 1861 Compendium, and on to Karl Brugmann's five-volume Grundriss, an outline of the family published from 1886 to 1893. Brugmann's Neogrammarian rethinking of the field, together with Ferdinand de Saussure's idea of a "consonantal schwa", marks the start of contemporary Indo-European studies. Saussure's idea later grew into the laryngeal theory.

  The proto-language as described in the early 1900s is still accepted in its main outlines. Twentieth-century work has been a matter of tidying and systematizing, and of absorbing new material. The Anatolian and Tocharian branches, unknown in the 19th century, are the most important additions.

  The laryngeal theory was barely noticed at first, except as a clever analysis. It became mainstream after 1927, when Jerzy Kuryłowicz found that at least some of its hypothetical sounds survive in Anatolian.

  Julius Pokorny published his Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch in 1959. It slimmed down and updated the three-volume dictionary of Alois Walde and Pokorny, issued from 1927 to 1932. Both works survey the vocabulary gathered by the early 20th century. Pokorny's 1959 edition ignores recent trends in morphology and phonology, including the laryngeal theory, and largely sets aside Anatolian and Tocharian data.

  The generation active in the last third of the 20th century included Oswald Szemerényi, Calvert Watkins, Warren Cowgill, Jochem Schindler and Helmut Rix. They gained a better grasp of morphology and, following Kuryłowicz's 1956 L'apophonie en indo-européen, of ablaut. Rix's Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben of 1997 began the modernization of Pokorny's dictionary. Volumes on nouns followed in 2008, and on pronouns and particles in 2014.

  From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became certain enough to reshape the image of the proto-language. Current work focuses on relative chronology within PIE, aiming to separate early, middle and late stages, or inner and outer dialects. No general consensus has formed yet.

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• 7. Methods and Neighbors

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  The comparative method was formally developed in the 19th century and applied first to the Indo-European languages. Even then, scholars had not agreed on the internal groupings of the family.

  Internal reconstruction works differently. It compares patterns within a single dialect, with no outside comparison, to infer regularities from an earlier stage of that dialect. It has also been used to reach back to stages of PIE that the comparative method cannot touch.

  Some researchers go further and place Indo-European inside super-families, such as Nostratic or Eurasiatic.

  The push to recover historical depth has been joined to archaeology, most famously through the Kurgan hypothesis. J. P. Mallory's 1989 In Search of the Indo-Europeans and his 1997 Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture give an overview of that effort. Georges Dumézil tried to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European culture and mythology. Marija Gimbutas and Colin Renfrew contributed through archaeology, and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza through genetics.

  These attempts to reconstruct the daily world of the Proto-Indo-Europeans are not formally part of comparative linguistics. They belong to a sister discipline, which is why the umbrella field is called interdisciplinary.

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• 8. Journals and Centres

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  Kuhn's Zeitschrift, abbreviated KZ, has appeared since 1852 and was renamed Historische Sprachforschung in 1988. The Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris began in 1869, Indogermanische Forschungen in 1892, and Glotta in 1909. Die Sprache followed in 1949, Münchner Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft in 1952, and the Journal of Indo-European Studies in 1973.

  Newer titles include Tocharian and Indo-European Studies from 1987, Studia indo-europaea from 2001, and the International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics and Linguistic Reconstruction, based in Munich, from 2004. Indo-European Linguistics began in 2012. Book series carry the work further: Leiden Studies in Indo-European was founded in 1991, Copenhagen Studies in Indo-European in 1999, and the Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series in 2005.

  Dedicated institutes and faculties exist at universities across Europe and North America. Austria has Vienna and Innsbruck, Croatia has Zagreb, and the Czech Republic has Prague and Brno. Germany has a long list, including Munich, Jena, Würzburg, Marburg, Cologne, Berlin, Göttingen, Halle, Erlangen and Frankfurt am Main. Leiden hosts Alexander Lubotsky and Alwin Kloekhorst among others, and in the United States Cornell, Harvard, UCLA and Texas are listed.

  The field also keeps a roll of its historical figures. It begins with Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) and ends with Jochem Schindler (1944-1994), a span of more than two centuries of names.

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