Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures, tables, and charts
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: how are languages shown to be related to one another?
- 2 The beginning of comparative linguistics
- 3 “Asiatic Jones, Oriental Jones”: Sir William Jones’ role in the raise of comparative linguistics
- 4 Consolidation of comparative linguistics
- 5 How some languages were shown to belong to Indo-European
- 6 Comparative linguistics of other language families and regions
- 7 How to show languages are related: the methods
- 8 The philosophical–psychological– typological–evolutionary approach to language relationships
- 9 Assessment of proposed distant genetic relationships
- 10 Beyond the comparative method?
- 11 Why and how do languages diversify and spread?
- 12 What can we learn about the earliest human language by comparing languages known today?
- 13 Conclusions: anticipating the future
- Appendix: Hypothesized distant genetic relationships
- References
- Index
4 - Consolidation of comparative linguistics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures, tables, and charts
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: how are languages shown to be related to one another?
- 2 The beginning of comparative linguistics
- 3 “Asiatic Jones, Oriental Jones”: Sir William Jones’ role in the raise of comparative linguistics
- 4 Consolidation of comparative linguistics
- 5 How some languages were shown to belong to Indo-European
- 6 Comparative linguistics of other language families and regions
- 7 How to show languages are related: the methods
- 8 The philosophical–psychological– typological–evolutionary approach to language relationships
- 9 Assessment of proposed distant genetic relationships
- 10 Beyond the comparative method?
- 11 Why and how do languages diversify and spread?
- 12 What can we learn about the earliest human language by comparing languages known today?
- 13 Conclusions: anticipating the future
- Appendix: Hypothesized distant genetic relationships
- References
- Index
Summary
The diversity of languages originated in the building of the tower after the deluge … There are … three sacred languages: Hebrew, Greek and Latin which are the most excellent in the whole world … Five varieties of Greek can be distinguished … Koine … Attic … Doric … Ionic … Aeolic. Some say that the Latin language is four languages, that is Ancient, Latin, Roman and Mixed. Ancient … [was] used during the reign of Janus and Saturn … Latin is the language which the Etruscans and other peoples in Latium spoke during the reign of Latinus and the kings … Roman is the language which the Roman people after the banishment of the kings started to use and which the poets Naevius, Plautus, Ennius and Virgil and the orators Gracchus and Cato and Cicero and others made current. Mixed is the language which, after the empire had been enlarged … burst into the Roman state together with customs and nations and corrupted the integrity of the word through barbarisms and solecisms.
(Spanish Bishop Isidorus [c.560–636])(Hovdhaugen 1982:110)Introduction
There is nothing in the methods used by scholars for establishing language families which distinguishes the pre-Jones era from post-Jones times, though the methods gradually came to be more refined and their employment led increasingly to the establishment of more language families and to further refinements in the language families already accepted. Our goal in this chapter is to chart these developments.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Language ClassificationHistory and Method, pp. 48 - 73Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008