Re: Universality of Interjections?

Neeraj Mathur wrote:
>
> <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.

"Bopp and the Neo-Grammarians"? That's like saying "at the time that
Lloyd George and Blair were reformulating British foreign policy."
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.