Indo European Poetry and Myth PDF Free Download
Excerpt From The Book
‘Indo-European’ is primarily a term of historical linguistics.
It refers to the great family of languages that now extends across every continent and already two thousand years ago extended across the whole breadth of
Europe and large tracts of central and southern Asia; or it refers to the hypothetical ancestral language from which all the recorded Indo-European languages descend.
That affinities existed among various of these languages, including Persian and Sanskrit, was often observed from the sixteenth century on.
In the seventeenth, the idea emerged of an extinct parent language, generally identified as ‘Scythian’ or ‘Japhetic’, as the source of the historical tongues.
The scientific study of linguistic relatioñships began early in the nineteenth century, pioneered by scholars with monosyllabic names such as Rask, Bopp, Grimm, and Pott.
It was at this time that the terms ‘Indo-Germanic and “Indo-European were coined; they are first recorded in 1810 and 1813 respectively.
The two centuries since then have seen steady advances in knowledge and understanding, and the progress achieved is now cumulatively enormous.
All serious students operate on the assumption of a single parent language as the historical source of all the known Indo-European languages. This is still a hypothesis, not an observable fact, but it is an inescapable hypothesis.
Of course, when this Proto-Indo-European was spoken, it was itself only one of many languages that existed at that time, and it was no doubt related to some of the others.
Some scholars argue for affinities with Semitic, Caucasian, and Uralian, and gather all of these, together with Indo-European, into a super-family dubbed ‘Nostratic’.
This shimmering construct is of no consequence for the present study. But it is good to bear in mind that Indo-European was not a unique, original entity like the primal cosmic atom before the Big Bang.
| Writer | M L West |
| Language | English |
| Pages | 540 |
| Pdf Size | 2.22 MB |
| Category | Poetry |
Indo European Poetry and Myth Book Pdf Free Download