‘A Branch of Indo-European’ (original) (raw)

The adjective 'Celtic' has its most respectable and formal use within linguistics. The idea of the Indo-European languages is a result of the increasingly scholarly and scientific study of language in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarities between otherwise very different languages in Europe had long been noticed, with erudite Romans speculating on the relationship of their own language to Greek. 1 Gerald of Wales made some thoughtful suggestions about the relationships between disparate languages in the late twelfth century, which have been seen as an early attempt at comparative Indo-European linguistics. 2 Only in the late eighteenth century, however, did thoughts on this subject begin to assume their modern form. Before then, attempts to understand the relationships between different languages had usually aimed at derivation from Greek or Latin (as privileged languages of ancient scholarship), or from Old Testament Hebrew. In 1786, however, William Jones, in a now famous address to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, noted that Sanskrit, the language of Indian religious learning, had remarkable affinities with Latin and Greek. He further suggested that these three languages, and indeed other European languages, and Persian, had a common origin. As Lockwood says, 'the modern science of comparative philology had begun' (Lockwood, 1969:22). The progressive scholarly elaboration of these ideas represents, perhaps, the greatest modern intellectual achievement in the humanities.3 The group of related languages to which Jones had drawn attention came to be called 'Indo-European' (although, in studies written in German, as many were, 'Indo-Germanic' was also commonly used). The theory of the Indo-European languages supposed that there was, behind all the modern Indo-European languages, a single common ancestor language (a 'Common Indo-European'), from which all the different modern languages had, over the years, diverged. This 'Common Indo-European' was not attested, in that no record of it survived, but increasingly sophisticated study of the earliest recorded forms, and of the laws of sound change, enabled the construction of hypothetical common forms. From this recon