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The Indo-Europeans and Greece

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

André Martinet
André Martinet*
Affiliation:
École pratique des hautes études, Paris
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Extract

Even in scientific usage there are terms that we believe we understand and when we try to pinpoint what they refer to we notice that these terms do not have a precise meaning. This applies, in linguistics, to the term Indo-European. Mostly, when used as an adjective, it seems to apply to those languages that derive, hypothetically, from a disappeared idiom which some scholars for nearly two hundred years have been trying to reconstruct. Thus, it is said that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin are Indo-European languages. When this epithet is applied to French it causes surprise. From a comparative viewpoint, French is usually seen as a Romance language and only Romance languages taken together or, better said, Latin from which they derive, seem to merit the epithet. When used as a noun, “Indo-European” may designate the disappeared language itself. But serious scholars give it a precision in this case like commun in French, proto in English or Ur- in German. Does this imply that we may designate as Indo-European the sum of the individual languages of this family, whether they still exist or have disappeared? One may indeed take a chance and do it, but not without startling or even shocking one's public.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 37 , Issue 145 , March 1989 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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