Re: Universality of Interjections?


<phippsmartin@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1118360923.025279.56840@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> I'm not talking about actual researchers. I'm talking about regular
> contributors to this group. I've seen people here claim that _only_
> linguistic data is used to determine if languages are related, that
> known historical migrations are not taken into account. Nonsense!

In 1786 when William Jones announced that Sanskrit was related to Greek,
Latin, Gothic, Celtic and Avestan - specifying that he meant that each had
sprung from some single common source language, 'which is perhaps no longer
spoken' - he was working with linguistic data only. He had no idea of any
historical migrations that could account for the findings. In fact, the
entire 'Aryan Invasion' theory about the population trends of Ancient India
is based pretty much entirely on the imaginings of people working from the
linguistic relationship. Even at the time that Bopp and the Neo-Grammarians
were reformulating Jones' claim and describing the relationship in great
detail between all these languages, there simply weren't any pre-historical
or archaeological data available for them to consider. They created
arguments that were entirely linguistic; these linguistic arguments were
used as the basis for an ideology which developed the 'received' view of the
histories of these people. To this day, the findings of archaeologists
(historians have little import in the matter, since we are dealing with
pre-literate cultures) are of virtually no use, since they are incomplete,
controversial, and unable to tell you anything about language (you can't ask
a bone if it spoke Indo-European).

At this point in time, historical linguistics is simply much more advanced
and sophisticated - thus more apt to describe the languages in question -
than archaeology. If you are interested in some cross-disciplinary work on
the Indo-European issue, have a look at J.P. Mallory's _In Search of the
Indo-Europeans_ (1986) - the book attempts to use linguistics, archaeology,
and the study of literature and anthropological views to arrive at some sort
of narrative about the Indo-European peoples. Based on your postings I think
you'd find it most agreeable. I find the book an interesting read, but at
the end of the day it doesn't deal with any linguistic questions, like
whether early IE was ergative, how many laryngeals it had, and how to marry
the perfect, middle, and Hittite hi-conjugation. (If you're interested in
this last issue - and everybody should be I think :) - check out Jasanoff's
book _Hittite and the Indo-European Verb_ (OUP, 2002 I think).)

> One
> poster on this group went so far as to claim that the term "Germanic"
> is only used by linguists refering to the language group, that it is
> not used by anthropologists to refer to Germanic people themselves.

I won't speak for any other poster; for myself, I can assure you that
whether anthropologists decide to use the term 'Germanic' to refer to a
people or not is as irrelevant to linguistics as the modern Californian
usage of the word 'karma' is to ancient Indian philosophy - or, for that
matter, as irrelevant as the usage by an employment agency of the word
'work' is to a Newtonian physicist.

I personally would probably use the word 'Germanic' to refer to a historical
group of people. But this doesn't have any bearing on how I use 'Germanic'
when referring to a language group. There are non-Germanic peoples who speak
Germanic tongues; I'm one of them. By the same token, some Germanic people
spoke non-Germanic languages - the Franks are a good example.

> I'm sorry if the point I was trying to make didn't get through to you
> (Nathan): simply put, my point is that any researcher should have at
> least a passing familiarity with disciplines related to his or her own.

Linguistics itself is a huge field. I'm a historical linguist, if I'm one at
all; as far as I'm concerned, 'having a passing familiarity with disciplines
related' to my own means knowing something about linguistic typology, a few
things about phonology and morphology, and a little about child language
acquisition. Given that I deal with Indo-European, I also have some
familiarity with the ancient literature that is relevant (particularly the
literatures of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Old English). I naturally also
know about the histories of the region, and am abreast of the major
archaeological findings. Nevertheless, when I'm trying to figure out if
there's a convincing case to be made for IE having had glottalic stops,
nothing is relevant other than linguistic data - data about the languages I
know, and data about linguistic typology. Horses on Harappan seals are of no
importance whatsoever.

The basic problem, as I see it, is that the results of linguistics all too
often get sucked up into ideological battles about all sorts of things;
linguists are then accused of all sorts of rubbish which has no bearing on
linguistic issues. It's a bit like the way that Wagner and Strauss were
assimilated to Nazism just because Nazis incorporated their work into the
Nazi ideology - hardly the fault of a composer that was dead for decades and
another who spent the war shielding his Jewish children-in-law.

Neeraj Mathur


.

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