linguists-from-england

"Cremation was the usual way for the dead. [in Ancient India]"

"Among the metals, gold is most frequently mentioned in the Rigveda.... The metal which is most often referred to in the Rigveda next to gold is called ayas (Latin aes) .... In . most passages where it occurs the word appears to mean simply 'metal' . :In the few cases where it designates a particular metal, the evidence is not very conclusive; but the inference which may be drawn as to its colour is decidedly in ' favour of its having been reddish, which points to bronze and not iron.... It seems quite likely that the Aryans of that period were unacquainted with silver, . for its name is not mentioned in the Rigveda ...."

"Thus, in the case of Indo-European language relationships, it is possible to make the argument that the creation of a hypothesis relating the languages of Northern India to those of Europe was initially created and promulgated by nineteenth century scholars in order to promote agendas of colonialism or racism."

"In summary the Indo-Europeanist’s data and method do not allow the question ‘When was PIE spoken?’ to be answered in any really meaningful or helpful way."

"What does this mean for the origin of the Indic languages, and by extension, the origin of the Indic civilization? My answer is, I am afraid, inconclusive. From the linguistic data alone, without taking into account the evidence of archaeology or early texts, it is not possible to draw definite conclusions about the homeland of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, or even the age of the language family. The Indo-European model, as a model of language relationships and of linguistic descent, tells us nothing certain about the origin of the Indic civilization."

"What has always filled me with wonder is the assurance with which many historical linguists assign a date to their reconstructed proto-language. . . . We are told that proto-Indo- European was spoken about 6,000 years ago. What is know with a fair degree of certainty is the time between proto-Indo-Aryan and the modern Inclo-Aryan languages—something in the order of 3,000 years. But how can anyone tell that the development from proto- Indo-European to proto-Indo-Aryan took another 3,000 years? . . . Languages are known to change at different rates. There is no way of knowing how long it took to go from the presumed homogeneity of proto-Indo-European to the linguistic diversity of proto-Indo- Iranian, proto-Celtic, proto-Germanic, etc. The changes could have been rapid or slow. We simply don't know. . . .Why couldn't proto-lndo-European have been spoken about 10,500 years ago? . . . The received opinion of a date of around 6000 BP for proto-Indo- European . . . is an ingrained one. I have found this a difficult matter to get specialists to even discuss. Yet it does seem to be a house of cards. (47-49)"

"From the linguistic data alone... it is not possible to draw definite conclusions about the homeland of the speakers of PIE, or even the age of the language family."

"The role of the Indo-European peoples in the ancient world has been portrayed too often as the incarnation of northern virility sweeping down in massed chariots to bring new vigour to a decadent south."

"It is disappointing to have to say that at present there seems to be no hope of estimating objectively and with a useful degree of precision how long an originally homogeneous Indo-European language would have taken to develop into derivative groups or languages which diverged as much as Greek, Sanskrit and Hittite did when the earliest texts in them were composed. Some linguists seem to think that they can make intuitive judgements about the minimum time which a particular phonetic or other change in a language would have taken. But the results of intuition when applied to estimating the minimum time in which a group of cognate languages or dialects would have differentiated to an observed extent vary so much that no useful deductions can be made from them. I sympathize with archaeologists and other prehistorians who are not primarily linguists over this. Linguists are unable to provide the information which would be most useful."

"What seems to have happened is that the seminar room has taken on a life of its own; that topics are established and debated, regardless of any empirical reality. And that hypotheses evolve through a type of arms race; each one has to be more bizarre than the last to attract attention. The larger the constituency, and English literature is the largest of all, the more like an ants’ nest the competition. Only the weirdest survive. Similarly with linguistics; perhaps less than a twentieth of all linguists do anything that could really be described as empirical investigation and tiny fraction of that pays attention to little-known languages."

"Arunachal Pradesh consists of a chain of isolated languages, which have been on the southern edge of the core Tibeto-Burman area. A plethora of different contact situations have allowed both lexical borrowing and sometimes striking grammatical and phonological restructuring. But perhaps it would be useful to begin considering this region as more similar to the Amazon or NE Asia than Tibet."

"Arunachal Pradesh should be treated as a major priority on a global scale. Languages such as Basque and Burushaski have attracted high levels of scholarly interest over many decades precisely because of their status as language isolates. Those in Arunachal Pradesh have been completely bypassed. Moreover, although these languages are presently still spoken, their populations are small and pressure to switch to Hindi, promoted in both the media and via the school system, is growing. Probably by no coincidence, Arunachal Pradesh is also a major centre for biodiversity, something which attracts worldwide attention and resources. It is suggested that the little-known languages of Arunachal Pradesh should be given similar priority due to their uniqueness and endangered status."

"Since honour from the honourer proceeds, How well do they deserve that memorize And leave in Books, for all posterities The names of worthies and their virtuous deeds."

"It is now generally agreed by most authorities on the subject that the Aryan linguistic vestiges in the Near East are to be connected specifically with Indo- Aryan, and not with the Iranian, and also that they do not represent a third, independent group, and are not to be ahscribed to the hypothetically reconstructed Proto-Aryan."

"How poor remembrances are statues, tombs, And other monuments that men erect To princes, which remain in closèd rooms Where but a few behold them, in respect Of Books, that to the universal eye Show how they lived; the other where they lie!"

"“… in the case of Indo-European it is certain that there was no such unitary language which can be reached by means of comparison. It woul be easy to produce, more or less ad infinitum [,] a list of forms like Skt nabhi-, Gk omphalos ‘navel’, which although inherited directly from the primitive IE period, and radically related [,] are irreducible to a single original. In fact detailed comparison makes it clear that the Indo- European that we can reach by this means was already deeply split up into a series of varying dialects.”"

"Burrow, whose The Sanskrit Language (1973) is still the authority in this field, says: "Vedic is a language which in most respects is more archaic and less altered from original Indo-European than any other member of the family" (34); he also states that root nouns, "very much in decline in the earliest recorded Indo-European languages", are preserved better in Sanskrit, and later adds, "Chiefly owing to its antiquity the Sanskrit language is more readily analysable, and its roots more easily separable from accretionary elements than… any other IE language" (123, 289)."

"The Aryan invasion of India is recorded in no written document, and it cannot yet be traced archaeologically, but it is nevertheless firmly established as a historical fact on the basis of comparative philology."

"In addition, in his The Sanskrit Language T. Burrow finds a few traces of the Sanskrit language among the documents of the Kassite dynasty of Babylon: “In a list of names of gods with Babylonian equivalents we find a sun-god Suriyas (rendered Samas) which must clearly be identified with Skt Surya. In addition, Maruttas the war-god (rendered En-Urta) has been compared with Skt Marut … Among the kings of this dynasty one has a name which can be interpreted as Aryan: Abhirattas: abhi-ratha – ‘facing chariots in battle’.”"

"The Aryans appear in Mitanni from 1500 BC as the ruling dynasty, which means that they must have entered the country as conquerors."

"England is the paradise of women, the purgatory of men, and the hell of horses."

"As T. Burrow puts it in his book The Sanskrit Language (Delhi ed. 2001: Motilal Banarsidass, p.4): The relations between the ancient Iranian and the language of the Vedas is so close that it is not possible satisfactorily to study one without the other. Grammatically the differences are very small; the chief differentiation in the earliest period lies in certain characteristic and well-defined phonetic changes which have affected Iranian on the one hand and Indo-Iranian on the other. It is quite possible to find verses in the oldest portion of the Avesta, which simply by phonetic substitutions according to established laws can be turned into intelligible Sanskrit. The greater part of the vocabulary is held in common and a large list could be provided of the words shared between the two which are absent from the rest of the Indo-European."

"The geographical horizon of the Avesta is almost exclusively eastern Iranian, but it does have some references which indicate the presence of Proto Indoaryans in northern central Iran, bringing them within striking distance of the Near East. These are the references which occur from time to time in the Avesta to the Mazanian daevas. The adjective in question (mdzainya-) is derived from *mdzana-, the name of a coun try which happens not to occur as such in the Avesta, but whose location is indicated by the fact that it has always been known to be connected with the country later known as Mazandaran, i.e. the territory between the southern shore of the Caspian sea and the Alburz mountain range. In the later tradition this figures prominently as a region hostile to the Iranians and as a notorious home of Devs. The presence of daevas in Mazana indicates the presence of daeva-worshippers, and since we have seen that the daeva-worshippers were the Proto-Indoaryans, we can conclude that the Avestan references to Mazanian daevas indicate their presence also in this region."

"... The Hittites were a very real power. Not very many centuries before the age of they had contested the empire of Western Asia with the Egyptians, and though their power had waned in the days of they were still formidable enemies and useful allies. They were still worthy of comparison with the divided kingdom of Egypt, and infinitely more powerful than that of . But we hear no more about them in the subsequent records of the Old Testament. The age of Hittite supremacy belongs to an earlier date than the rise of the monarchy in Israel; earlier, we may even say, than the Israelitish conquest of ."

"During the last half-century a new world has been opened out before us by the excavators and decipherers of the ancient monuments of the East, the great civilisations of the past have risen up, as it were, from their grave, and we find ourselves face to face with the contemporaries of and , of Moses and of Abraham. Pages of history have been restored to us which had seemed lost for ever, and we are beginning to learn that the old empires of the Orient were in many respects as cultured and literary as is the world of to-day. The Old Testament has hitherto stood alone; the literature which existed by the side of it in the oriental world seemed to have perished, and if we would test and verify, illustrate or explain its statements, we had nothing to fall back upon except a few scattered fragments of doubtful value, which had come to us through Jewish and Christian apologists, or the misleading myths and fables of Greek writers. The books of the Old Testament Scriptures could be explained and interpreted only through themselves; they were what the logicians would call “a single instance”; there was nothing similar with which they could be compared, no contemporaneous record which could throw light on the facts they contained."

"The nearer a language is to its primary centre, the less alteration we are likely to find in it. Now of all the Aryan dialects, Sanskrit and Zend may, on the whole, be considered to have changed the least."

"... In the literary age of Greece and Rome the ancient religions of Babylonia and Egypt had passed into their dotage, and the conceptions on which they were founded had been transformed or forgotten. What was left of them was little more than an empty and unintelligible husk, or even a mere caricature. The gods, in whose name the kings of had gone forth to conquer, and in whose honour had reared the temples and palaces of Babylon, had degenerated into the patrons of a system of magic; the priests, who had once made and unmade the lords of the East, had become “Chaldæan” fortune-tellers, and the religion and science of Babylonia were remembered only for their connection with astrology. The old tradition had survived in Egypt with less apparent alteration, but even there the continuity of religious belief and teaching was more apparent than real, external rather than internal; and though the ... and early s rebuilt the temples on the old lines, and allowed themselves to be depicted in the dress of the Pharaohs, making offerings to gods whose very names they could not have pronounced, it was all felt to be but a sham, a dressing up, as it were, in the clothes of a religion out of which all the spirit and life had fled."

"The Hittites were a people with yellow skins and ‘mongoloid’ features whose receding foreheads, oblique eyes, and protruding upper jaws, are represented as faithfully on their own monuments as they are on those of Egypt, so that we cannot accuse the Egyptian artists of caricaturing their enemies... We have seen that the Hittites were a northern race. Their primitive home probably lay on the northern side of the Taurus. What they were like we can learn both from their own sculptures and from the Egyptian monuments, which agree most remarkably in the delineation of their features. The extraordinary resemblance between the Hittite faces drawn by the Egyptian artists and those depicted by themselves in their bas-reliefs and their hieroglyphs, is a convincing proof of the faithfulness of the Egyptian representations, as well as of the identity of the Hittites of the Egyptian inscriptions with the Hittites of Carchemish and Kappadokia. It must be confessed that they were not a handsome people. They were short and thick of limb, and the front part of their faces was pushed forward in a curious and somewhat repulsive way. The forehead retreated, the cheek-bones were high, the nostrils were large, the upper lip protrusive. They had, in fact, according to the craniologists, the characteristics of a Mongoloid race. Like the Mongols, moreover, their skins were yellow and their eyes and hair were black. They arranged the hair in the form of a 'pig-tail,' which characterizes them on their own and the Egyptian monuments quite as much as their snow-shoes with upturned toes. In Syria they doubtless mixed with the Semitic race, and the further south they advanced the more likely they were to become absorbed into the native population."

"In the early spring of 1859 I saw London for the first time. My father introduced me to all the chief sights of the metropolis, including, of course, the with its diving-bell, as well as the , which were closed shortly afterwards. I spent hours in the , more especially in the Egyptian and Assyrian rooms; the spell of the East became more potent than ever, and I still have a small note-book in which I endeavoured to copy the strange characters on one of the tablets in the glass cases."

"Strong freedom ensures that some actions are represented as directed to ends which are not merely mine, but which are also freely adopted or pursued by me."

"The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more."

"The maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence."

"The maxim of relation, where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the discussion."

"The maxim of manner, when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity."

"One generation has set Cornish on its feet. It is now for another to make it walk."

"Socrates, obviously unfair though he is, puts his finger on the weak spot of Greek religion as orthodoxly conceived in the fifth century B.C. Its formula is do ut des. It as, as Socrates says, a 'business transaction' and one in which, because god is greater than man, man gets on the whole the best of it."

"It is useless, or almost useless, to offer to Youth the treasures of experience gathered by Age. "When you are my age," says Crabbed Age, "you will know what I know, see as I see." Nothing could be more profoundly false. History does not repeat itself. Evolution forbids. When you are my age, you will not know what I know, but something quite different."

"Women qua women may remain, for the better continuance of life, subject to men; women as human beings demand to live as well as to continue life. To live effectively they must learn to know the world through and through, in order that, while side by side with men, they may fashion life to their common good."

"Professional and literary London I have known, academic Cambridge I do know. That other Youth—that is, happy peasants, coal-heavers, opulent stockbrokers, and the higher form of young barbarians—I do not know, and of them I do not speak. I accept my limitations."

"Greek writers of the fifth century B.C. have a way of speaking of, an attitude towards, religion, as though it were wholly a thing of joyful confidence, a friendly fellowship with the gods, whose service is but a high festival for man. In Homer sacrifice is but, as it were, the signal for a banquet of abundant roast flesh and sweet wine; we hear nothing of fasting, of cleansing, and atonement."

"There is always the danger that the use of traditional grammatical terms with reference to a wide variety of languages may be taken to imply a secret belief in universal grammar. Every analysis of a particular ‘language’ must of necessity determine the values of the ad hoc categories to which traditional names are given. What is here being sketched is a general linguistic theory applicable to particular linguistic descriptions, not a theory of universals for general linguistic description."

"The various structures of sentences in any given language, comprising for example at least two nominal pieces and a verbal piece must be collated, and such categories as voice, mood, affirmative, negative, tense, aspect, gender, number, person and case, if found applicable and valid in descriptive statement, are to be abstracted from, and referred back to the sentence as a whole."

"Speech is our most valuable instrument, because we can make it fit our common lives. We are not born to follow words. Words follow life. It has always been so from the very beginning. In fact, the human larynx and the shape of the passages above it have evolved in harmony with the lives our earliest ancestors lived, first in the trees, and then on the ground."

"Strictly speaking, the grammatical method of resolving a sentence into parts is nothing but a fanciful procedure ; but it is the real fountain of all knowledge, since it led to the invention of writing."

"You shall know a word by the company it keeps."

"The complete meaning of a word is always contextual, and no study of meaning apart from context can be taken seriously."

"It is not easy to determine what are the units of speech. Some would say speech sounds, others phonemes... The general opinion is, however, that words, not phones or phonemes or phoneme systems, are the units of speech."

"Research into the detailed contextual distribution of sociologically important words, what one might call focal or pivotal words, is only just beginning."

"The phonetic animal par excellence is man. All men are born with an infinite capacity for making noises and using them."

"Collocations are actual words in habitual company. A word in a usual collocation stares you in the face just as it is. Colligations cannot be of words as such. Colligations of grammatical categories related in a grammatical structure do not necessarily follow word divisions or even sub-divisions of words."