philologists

"Abbreviations are the wheels of language, the wings of Mercury. And though we might be dragged along without them, it would be with much difficulty, very heavily and tediously."

"I never cared a bit for philology; my chief aim has been throughout to illustrate the social condition of the English people in the past."

"Aux États-Unis la nature, comme la société, n'est pas toujours belle, mais elle est toujours grande."

"Since the normal tendency is to simplify, to trivialize, to eliminate the unfamiliar word or construction, the rule is praestat difficilior lectio...When we choose the 'more difficult' reading, however, we must be sure that it is in itself a plausible reading. The principle should not be used in support of dubious syntax, or phrasing that it would not have been natural for the author to use. There is an important difference between a more difficult reading and a more unlikely reading."

"Although Champollion was an avowed revolutionary and an enthusiastic Bonapartist, one of his earliest discoveries discredited some of the theories of Dupuis’s supporters, and he and his decipherment were therefore welcomed by the Church and the Restoration nobility. On the other hand, his championing of Egypt over Greece combined with his political beliefs to infuriate Hellenist and Indianist scholars, who continued to do all they could to block his academic career."

"For what is more important and can be desired more urgently from the study of classical languages than the comparison of these with our mother tongue in its most ancient, most perfect form?”"

"Though Bopp, by the end of his life, was an internationally respected and honored scholar, his was not a career without conflict. Reflecting much later on the difficulties his teacher faced, Max Muller recalled the period in the 1820s and 1830s in which scholars and especially classicists would not believe that there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers of India.... No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, and Gothic. All hands were against him; and if in comparing Greek and Latin with Sanskrit, Gothic, Celtic, Slavonic, or Persian, he happened to have placed one single accent wrong, the shouts of those who knew nothing but Greek and Latin, and probably looked in their Greek Dictionaries to be quite sure of their accents, would never end."

"They would not have it, they would not believe that there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers of India. The classical scholars scouted the idea, and I still remember the time, when 1 was a student at Leipzig and begun to study Sanskrit, with what contempt any remarks on Sanskrit or comparative grammar were treated by my teachers. . . . No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin and Gothic. All hands were against him. (28) Unlike some of his contemporaries, Muller was effusive in his admiration for things Indian (although he never subscribed to an Indian homeland). In his course of lectures "India: What Can It Teach Us?" (1883), he declared that she was "the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow," indeed, "a very paradise on earth," a place where "the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, [and] has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life. [Such lavish praise was far too extreme for those who, as Muller himself noted, would be] "horror struck at the idea that the humanity they meet with [in India] . . . should be able to teach us any lesson."

"That classical philology received comparative linguistics with mistrust and doubt was very natural. The newborn younger sister threatened to pull the painstakingly prepared ground from under the feet of the elder, in giving her to understand, you have wandered in darkness up until now; I will enlighten you. Few trusted these voices at the beginning, many closed their ears to the sirens’ songs...’"

"To boast of the help you gave a brother in need is to cancel the good of your deed."

"The truth hurts like a thorn at first; but in the end it blossoms like a rose."

""Be glad," she said, "God brought you to fifty years in your world"— but didn't know there's no division between, as I see it, my days that have passed and Noah's of which I've heard. In the world I have nothing but the hour I'm in, which stands for a moment and then like a cloud moves on."

"Must we invoke some sort of cognitive dissonance to explain how the same man could, with no apparent sense of inconsistency, live a life of a prominent rabbinical authority and that of a philandering bon vivant?"

"Born during this era of Islamic rule, the famous Golden Age of Spanish Jewry (circa 900-1200) produced such luminaries as: statesman and diplomat Hasdai ibn Shaprut, vizier and army commander Shmuel ha-Nagid, poet-philosophers Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Judah Halevi, and at the apex of them all, Moses Ben Maimon, also known among the Spaniards as Maimonides."

"One of the more controversial aspects of Samuel HaNagid's poetry is the fact that many of them are erotic in nature. More shocking is that many of these erotic themes are replete with homosexual themes. This is both surprising and not. It is surprising since HaNagid's poetry reveals him as a man who strictly interpreted god's laws, and did nothing to actively go against it. As anyone who has read Leviticus knows, homosexual activity is considered a great sin. These themes, however, are unsurprising when looking at the greater canon of medieval poetry, especially that of the Arab lands. Themes of intense sexuality and even homosexuality are not uncommon among Andalusian Muslim poetry."

"It is clear that for Herbert Hunger, Byzantium was not an exotic phenomenon in the historical and political self-awareness of Austria in the twentieth century, but a legacy and consequently a claim whose pointed cultivation should certainly benefit the country's image. This – one might say – national goal, which we today would rather describe as a European goal, has, as we all know, been realized."

"Multæ terricolis linguæ, cœlestibus una."

"Πολλαὶ μὲν θνητοῖς γλῶτται, μία δ'ἀθανάτοισιν."

"Since the very beginning of the history of the State, the Catholic Church has been an important factor in the upbuilding of the commonwealth and the welfare and education of the people. The difficulties encountered were not easy to overcome in the midst of an unsettled, careless, and often lawless community."

"Sir Alan Gardiner’s 1961 Egypt of the Pharaohs devoted a whole chapter to the dating problem. ‘In spite of all defects,’ he wrote, ‘this division into dynasties has taken so firm a root in the literature of Egyptology that there is little chance of its ever being abandoned. In the forms in which the book has reached us, there are inaccuracies of the most glaring kind…Africanus and Eusabius often do not agree; for example Africanus assigns nine kings to Dyn. XXII, while Eusabius only has three. Sometimes all that is vouchsafed to us is the number of kings in a dynasty and their city of origin…the lengths of reigns frequently differ in the two versions…the reconstructed Manetho remains full of imperfections…. Nonetheless, [it]still dominates our studies.’ Despite decades of archaeological discoveries and scholarly research since then, his conclusion is still relevant. ‘We are dealing with a civilisation thousands of years old and of which only tiny fragments have survived.’"

"He had to learn to sing, readily and accurately, all the tunes that were used in the many distinct Soma-sacrifices, and he had also to know which strophes were required for each sacrifice and in what order they were sung. Therefore, that the young priest might master all the tunes thoroughly and have any one at command at any moment, each was connected with a single stanza of the right metre, and the teacher made his pupils sing it over and over again, until tune and stanza were firmly imprinted, in indissoluble association, in the memory."

"And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess… [4:24]. Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Bunani informed us through Abu Sa‘id al-Khudri who said: “We had captured female prisoners of war on the day of Awtas and because they were already married we disliked having any physical relationship with them. Then we asked the Prophet, Allah bless him and give him peace, about them. And the verse, And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess, was then revealed, as a result of which we consider it lawful to have a physical relationship with them”. Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn al-Harith informed us through ‘Abd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn Ja‘far through Abu Yahya through Sahl ibn ‘Uthman through ‘Abd al-Rahim through Ash‘ath ibn Sawwar through ‘Uthman al-Batti through Abu’l-Khalil through Abu Sa‘id who said: “When the Messenger of Allah, Allah bless him and give him peace, captured the people of Awtas as prisoners of war we said: ‘O Prophet of Allah! How can we possibly have physical relationships with women whose lineage and husband we know very well?’ And so this verse was revealed: And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess”. Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Farisi informed us through Muhammad ibn ‘Isa ibn ‘Amrawayh through Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn Sufyan through Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj through ‘Ubayd Allah ibn ‘Umar al-Qawariri through Yazid ibn Zuray‘through Sa‘id ibn Abi ‘Arubah through Qatadah through Abu Salih Abu Khalil through Abu ‘Alqamah al-Hashimi through Abu Sa‘id al-Khudri who reported that on the day of Hunayn the Messenger of Allah, Allah bless him and give him peace, sent an army to Awtas. This army met the enemy in a battle, defeated them and captured many female prisoners from them. But some of the Companions of the Messenger, Allah bless him and give him peace, were uncomfortable about having physical relations with these prisoners because they had husbands who were idolaters, and so Allah, exalted is He, revealed about this: And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess."

"It is this evidence concerning the western contribution which persuaded workers to advocate the view that the Andronovo culture area was the original home of the Indo-Iranians, from where they marched into Iran and India as two separate groups by the end of the 2nd millennium B.C. or the beginning of the 1st millennium B.C. (Smirnov and Kuzmina 1977). The Andronovo hypothesis was nevertheless faced with a serious shortcoming from the very beginning. The cultures of the Timber-frame Andronovo circle took shape in the 16th or 17th century B.C., whereas the Aryans already appeared in the Near-East not latter than the 15th to 16th century B.C., and their occupation was intensive there by the 14th century B.C. The influx of the Indo-Aryan names appeared there as well as Indo-Aryan methods of and terms for chariot-driving and treaty swearing by the names of Indo-Aryan gods Mithra, Varuna, Indra, and Nasatyas (Mayrhofer 1966, 1974; Kammenhuber 1968; Gindin 1972; Abaev 1972). These regions contain nothing reminiscent of Timber-frame Andronovo materials; in fact, the latter could not have been there at so early a date."

"Where Kuzmina finds Andronovo archaeological prototypes for the inferred Indo-Aryan cultural equipment known by the Mitanni Syria in the Near East and the Vedic speakers in India, Klejn points out that no actual trace of this Andronovo culture in the archaeology of either of these-Indo-Aryan cultures in the Near East or India has come to light. Klejn's critique of this Andronovo hypothesis raises important objections. While acknowledging the Iranian identification of the Andronovo culture, he finds it much too late for an Indo-Aryan identification, since the Andronovo culture "took shape in the 16th or 17th century B.c, whereas the Aryans already appeared in the Near East not later than the 1 5th to 16th century B.C." More important, "these [latter] regions contain nothing reminiscent of Timber-Frame Andronovo materials" (Klejn 1974, 58). This is an essential point, especially since, as we have seen, some scholars date the Indo-Aryan presence in the Near East to the 18th or 17th century B.C.E. How, then, could the Indo- Aryans have been represented in a completely different material culture in the steppes at more or less the same time? An Indo-Iranian affiliation of the graves is even more unrealistic, since the joint Indo-Iranian period would have been much earlier than the dates for the Andronovo period. Brenties (1981), we can recall, pointed out the same objections with the Andronovo theory."

"The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference."

"I feel that in many respects I and my assistants are simply pioneers, pushing our way experimentally through an untrodden forest, where no white man's axe has been before us."

"Quotations will tell the full measure of meaning — if you have enough of them."

"Thank God for reflex decisions; they are the sine qua non of serenity. Suppose you had to decide afresh each day whether or not to brush your teeth?"

"When you write, you can hide behind your words. When you talk, you are up front, like the clown in the midway booth; any passer-by can bean you with a ball."

"All flowers are flirtatious—particularly if they carry hyphenated names. The more hyphens in the name, the flirtier the flower."

"I protest, for about the hundredth time, against the slipshod method of quoting a mere author’s name, without any indication of the work of that author in which the alleged quotation may be found. Let us have accurate quotations and exact references, wherever such are to be found. [...] A quotation without a reference is like a geological specimen of unknown locality."

"[T]he Australian black, without exception, nurtures, one might almost say from the cradle to the grave, an intense hatred of every male at least of his race who is a stranger to him. The reason they themselves assign for what I must term this diabolical feeling is, that all strangers are in league to take their lives by sorcery. The result of this belief is that whenever they can, the blacks in their wild state never neglect to massacre all male strangers who fall into their power. Females are ravished and often slain afterwards if they cannot be conveniently carried off. Such being the normal state of things amongst the Australian blacks, the cause of war, of which I am now treating is generally set down to the sorcery of some hostile or little-known tribe. In such cases a party will set out after the burial, mad for bloodshed; march by night in the most stealthy manner, perhaps fifty or a hundred and fifty miles, into a country inhabited by tribes the very names of which they may be ignorant of. On discovering a party of such people they will hide themselves, and then creep up to their camp during the night, when the inmates are asleep, butcher the men and children as they lie and the women after further atrocities. If the parties discovered be too large to slaughter wholesale, one or two will be disposed of by sudden onslaught or otherwise, and the invading party will quickly retire, to be followed in due course by warriors seeking their revenge. In melees of this sort it sometimes happens that a man or woman belonging to a tribe associated with the one whose members made the onslaught is killed in the darkness and confusion unrecognised the result of which is further complications and bloodshed. Should a man under any circumstances accidently kill one of his own tribe he has to undergo certain penalties. Though the custom of carrying on war in this manner is general throughout Australia, under no circumstances, I believe, is a sentinel ever posted. I have known a whole tribe pretty near, when apprehensive, watch until perhaps eleven o'clock and then all go to sleep. Onslaughts of this kind are usually made a couple of hours before daylight. Should blacks at any time come on a man with whom they are unacquainted they invariably kill him, if possible. Strange children are killed in a like manner. A black hates intensely those of his own race with whom he is unacquainted, always excepting the females. To one of these he will become attached, if he succeeds in carrying her off, otherwise, he will kill the women out of mere savageness and hatred of their husbands. I have never heard of a tribe yielding to another, for no quarter would be given; nor of a strong tribe attempting to possess itself of the territory of a weak one, as so commonly happens in Africa. No idea of conquest exists, nor properly speaking of battle, for their fights do not lead to slaughter or spoils, and are devoid of the ordinary consequences which follow battles and victories in civilized countries. This sort of warfare is favourable to the weak. As a token of peace, the Australians hold up green boughs."

"The white race seems destined to exterminate the blacks."

"Savage and objectionable as the is, it has played an important part in the past of the Australian race, for it tended strongly to keep up communication between the tribes. The renewal of friendly relations between tribes is always marked by a corroboree. When tribes corroboree, it is a gauge of peace; and this peace is, so far as I know, ratified in no other way. A quarrel between two associated tribes is usually brought to an end by an invitation to fight which invariably ends in a corroboree. A great point in it, as a medium of reconciliation, is that it excludes for the most part explanations, questions, and reflections. Two tribes at variance meet, a fight ensues, in which generally not much harm is done and then a corroboree takes place, and every point of honour is satisfied ipso facto. On the other hand, ill feelings, and eventually war, not infrequently originate at these meetings, and almost invariably as the result of outrages on women. Though advantages of some sorts have certainly resulted from the corroboree it was undoubtedly, especially when several tribes were present, often an occasion of licentiousness and violence."

"It is an elementary mistake to equate common Indo-European words with Proto-Indo- European words and to base thereon conclusions concerning the Proto-European Urvolk or Urheimat. Yet this is precisely what has often been done. . . . impassioned linguistic palaeontologists have gone even further. From the existence of certain items of vocabulary in all or a majority of the extant Indo-European languages, and blandly ignoring all the pitfalls just noted, they even fabricated conclusions concerning the social organization, the religion, the mores, the race of the Proto-Indo-European."

"We must not make the mistake of confusing our methods, and the results flowing from them, with the facts; we must not delude ourselves into believing that our retrogressive method of reconstruction matches, step by step, the real progression of linguistic history."

"Now the more sophisticated among us could easily object here that it would take a great deal of naivete on the part of linguistic palaeontologists to propound such views, . . . yet such naivete seems to enjoy the status of high acumen, as anyone can see who reads some of the numerous volumes that deal with the "Indo-Eutopeans," their lives and their mores. But if the authorship of such works is not astonishing enough, the uncritical and admiring credulity bestowed upon them by a vast number of scholars certainly is."

"Arguing about 'Proto-Indo-European' can be meaningful and fruitful . . . if we always explain whether we are talking about the one or the other— which, as we well know, we do not do."

"No reputable linguist pretends that Proto-Indo-European reconstructions represent a reality, and the unpronounceability of the asterisked formulae is not a legitimate argument against reconstruction."

"We now find ourselves in possession of two entirely different items, both of which we call Proto-Indo-European: one, a set of reconstructed formulae not representative of any reality; the other, an undiscovered (possibly undiscoverable) language of whose reality we may be certain."

"Quoi qu’en dise Aristote et sa docte cabale, Le tabac est divin, il n’est rien qui n’égale."

"Quand on n'a pas ce que l'on aime, Il faut aimer ce que l'on a."

"This also shows that Smith is not as great an imperialist as he is occasionally made out to be. In fact, on close reading, it is impossible to characterise Elphinstone and Smith as imperialist and anti-India historians. This cannot be said about E J Rapson, a Cambridge University Sanskrit professor, the editor of the ancient Indian history volume in the Cambridge History of India series, and the author of brief book, Ancient India, meant for the Indian Civil Service candidates. To Rapson there never was any originality in ancient Indian history, which was also a collection of histories of many separate countries. It is against characters like Rapson that Indian scholars of ancient India wielded their pens."

"Their oldest literature supplies no certain indication that they still retained the recollection of their former home; and we may reasonably conclude therefore that the invasion which brought them into India took place at a date considerably earlier."

"In a prehistoric era lost in the mists of time, a whole race, destined by Providence to reign one day supreme over the entire earth, was slowly growing in the primeval cradle, in which it was preparing for a brilliant future…. Favoured among all others by the beauty of its blood and the gifts of its intelligence, … this was the race of the Aryas, blessed from the beginning with the very qualities which the Hebrews lacked in order to become civilizers of the world…. The religion of Christ was destined to become the torch of humanity: the Greek genius welcomed it; the power of Rome propagated it far end wide, Germanic energy it new strength. Through a thousand battles, the whole race of the European Aryas … came to be the main instrument of God’s designs for the destiny of mankind."

"‘Is it not curious, moreover, to see the Aryas of Europe, after a separation of four to five thousand years, finding their way back, via a vast, circuitous route, to their unknown Indian brothers [so as] to dominate them and bring them the elements of a higher civilization and to discover among them the ancient proof of a common origin?’"

"[a]s regards all that refers to fields and gardens, the growing of flowers is the most recent conquest of European humanity. The pragmatism of prehistoric people had prevented them from discovering the attraction of these objects, so cherished by ladies and poets, in the same way that their ears remained deaf to the song of the lark and the nightingale. This only changed when flower scented perfumes from the East reached Europe and when man’s relationship with nature, at least in the upper echelons of society, began to become sentimental. (I, p. 151)"

"...the harmonious balance of their faculties and aptitudes, which is already perceivable to a high degree in the formation of their language and which presided, from the earliest times, over their social organization. A happy nature, where energy was tempered by gentleness, a lovely imagination and a powerful reason, an active intelligence and a spirit that was open to impressions of beauty, a genuine sentiment of truth and duty, a healthy morality and elevated religious instincts, such are the qualities which together gave them, along with the consciousness of their own value, the love of freedom and the constant desire for progress.8"

"All Europeans came from the Orient. This truth, which is confirmed by the evidence of physiology and of linguistics, no longer needs special proof."

"All the peoples of Europe and, to begin with, those which were originally related and which gained supremacy at the cost of many wanderings and dangers, emigrated from Asia in the remote past. They were propelled from East to West by an irresistable instinct (unhemmbarer Trieb), the real cause of which is unknown to us.... The vocation and courage of those peoples, which were originally related and destined to rise to such heights, is shown by the fact that European history was almost entirely made by them."