Forum; Comparative Linguistics: An Indo-European Symposium

But, thank you. This is Olive Graham for Forum. This week, Forum features a symposium on the study and reconstruction of Indo-European languages. Linguists should not operate in a vacuum. If we want to reconstruct culture, we cannot do this exclusively on the basis of language. Comparative Linguistics this week on Forum. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, welcome

to Forum. I'm Olive Graham. Linguists should not operate in a vacuum. If we want to reconstruct culture, we cannot do this exclusively on the basis of language. We have to try to correlate in some way the facts of language with the real things, with the objects, with what we find on the land, with the ecology, with the economy, with the institutions of the people we are talking about. Dr. Edgar C. Paulome, University of Texas at Austin, Linguist and Director of the IREX Conference on Comparative Linguistics. Our presentation today on Forum provides an introduction to the study of the origins of the languages and cultures that many of us take for granted in our present world.

An international gathering of linguists at the campus of the University of Texas at Austin shared their knowledge and research into a variety of problem areas that constitute the ongoing study of Indo-European languages, particularly their reconstruction. Dr. Edgar Poulome is a professor in the Department of Oriental and African Languages and Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin, and has appointments in the Germanic Languages and Linguistics Departments. He describes the work of Dr. Winford P. Laman, whose career in linguistics inspired this conference. Dr. Poulome. Dr. Poulome is a internationally known Indo-Europeanist, starting with a Germanic, he expanded his work in the direction of comparative linguistics, and one of his major works at the beginning of his career at the University of Texas in 1952 was a proto-Indo-European phonology which was recognized as a milestone in the reconstruction of Indo-European and was one of the elements that renewed the study of the phonology of Indo-European in the early 50s.

So Dr. Laman worked on alliteration and on all Germanic verse and then concentrated on all Germanic syntax and expanded it to the field of Indo-European syntax. And a few years later, he came out with a book devoted to proto-Indo-European syntax, which was a pioneering work in which he used a typological approach to the system of the phrase and sentence structure in Indo-European. This volume is also a milestone in our studies and, as attracted, wide national and international attention. Working in collaboration with number of scholars interested in the field of typology, Professor Laman, as then continued his research in that direction and assembled a collection of papers on typological studies

dealing with the structural features of a number of Indo-European languages and participated in a number of conferences dealing with the same topic nationally and internationally. The work of Professor Laman covers a wide area from the old Germanic dialect to Vedic and Hittite and he is therefore known to people active in all the various spheres of Indo-European studies. This is a reason why we tried to bring together, in the symposium at the University of Texas, some of the leading authorities in these various domains, trying on the one hand to emphasize the advances in the field of methodology and, on the other hand, to enhance the kind of contribution that he has made to a factual study in the field of Hittite

in the field of Sanskrit, the field of Germanic, etc. We have a series of papers that dealt with the problems of reconstruction and other papers that were more specifically geared towards such languages as Celtic or Armenian or Hittite or Vedic, etc. And some also paying specific attention to the relationship between the Indo-European languages and the non-Indo-European languages of the areas in which the Indo-European moved.

There were also a considerable number of papers devoted to the problem of etymology and this was related with the fact that Professor Laman just completed a new edition, completely revised and completely reworked of the etymological dictionary of Gothic which was published in the third edition in the 30s by Zigmund Faist. Linguists do not work in a vacuum. They rely on anthropologists and archaeologists whose work also centers around the Indo-European arena. Dr. Palome denotes the importance of archaeologists to their work. Collaboration with anthropologists and archaeologists is important. Modern archaeology has found ways to date things and has also progressed fantastically, especially in the areas where we assume the Indo-Europeans have lived. And it has been Professor Oma Thomas' life work to investigate these fields. So his presence at our symposium has been particularly precious to us, to help us put some order in our ideas and to help us correlate our linguistic

facts with the archaeological facts. Dr. Homer Thomas is a professor emeritus of archaeology at the University of Missouri Asia. His presentation at the conference addressed the role of archaeology in Indo-European comparative linguistics. Dr. Thomas describes the kind of problem he could fronts in his research. We've had for, since 1947-48, this radio carbon dating, a succession of problems rising from the dating technique itself. And these, no, are still far from resolved, although we have had new methods of calibrating against tree rings. We now have tree rings in our south-west, the marvelous bristle cones that grow out to the west, to a very dry country in Arizona, California, borderland. And very high altitude. No, we've discovered it oak series in Northern Ireland, which is becoming very productive, being done at Belfast. There is a group, we're getting along the Mosul on wood pilings of Roman bridges and other

earlier wood structures. The Mosul, as you know, flows from in France down through Luxembourg, through the Rhine, through the Rhine probably, but I should say Rhine Faltz, Rhine and Platonate, I suppose we should say in English, to the joins the Rhine, right in that area where many of you get your good Mosul wine when you want something from Germany, in the way of a white wine. Then they are digging on the upper Danube. The Danube, when it's really a very small stream, I know we all think that the Danube is a wide, flowing monster, but the time it gets on down in Europe. But there it's a tiny stream, and there they find wood structures, and then a very extensive operation is going on in Switzerland. Some five or six groups involved, there's a group in France, and I suppose the most reliable work is coming from, the one I would count upon at this point is coming from Switzerland. We are not doing series going well back before 4000 BC, and hopes that we'll reach 8,000.

And these are providing a very good check against, because they're in good archaeological context. Difficult with the bristle calms, they grow off on a wild cliff. This wood is coming from lake drawings, for example, pilings of lake drawings in the Swiss lakes. So we can make an association, immediate association, of the carbon date, with an archaeological, cultural occupation we have dug by archaeological means. The paper presented by Dr. Edgar Polamay indicates the work done in pursuit of the reconstruction of the culture of the Indo-Europeans. Reconstructing Indo-European culture in connection with comparative linguistics is not a new one. From the very start of the study of comparative linguistics in the 19th century, the promoter of the reconstruction of Indo-Europeans have been interested in reconstructing the culture

of the people whose language they were trying to restitute to us. Their views were full of romantic idealism. Criticism followed the names of Picted, the names of Victor Hain have been mentioned in this room before. I'm not going to go into details about what happened in the 19th century. At the beginning of the century, at the turn of the 19th century, the beginning of the century, Vertebundsachen, was the catch. And the more interest was shown for the ecology of the homeland. And we've heard up to the most tiring arguments, everything that is to say about the Salmon, the Beach, and the Birch, and what have you. And there's been efforts of synthesis, successively, by here, by Fist, by Devoto. A new trend was initiated by the French school, which brought in a social cultural perspective in the study, with Bavanniste's famous work on the institution, and the multiple studies of the religious heritage

of the Indo-Europeans by Georges Dumisile and his disciples. Finally, a couple of years ago, a new synthesis saw the light in Soviet Russia, with the work of academician Gamkelytsi and Ivanov, the second volume of their monumental work on Indo-Europeans and Indo-European. The question is, what kind of problems does such a method, such an approach in tail? There are all kinds of pitfalls when one operates with language to reconstruct the culture. One doesn't need to go very far if one opens etymological dictionaries. There's a lot of cases where people indulge in etymological speculations without checking the culture first and then reconstruct the culture on the basis of their own etymological views, which sometimes, of course, leads to rather strange opinions on what the culture

ought to be. I gave the example of Beth yesterday, and there are many more of that kind. Sometimes also a term could be found throughout the whole area of a definite language and reconstruct in the proto-language, and then one finds out I gave an example from Bantu because it's a very neat example. Got three reconstructs a proto-Bantu jugu, which means a peanut, but if a god that a peanut was brought into Africa by the Europeans from Tropical South America. So there goes the proto-Bantu peanut. You get examples of that all the time. The study of the languages that reach back to Indo-European origins requires an examination of ancient languages whose existence is verified through archaeological means, Dr. Pallame. At the beginning of this century, German archaeological expedition discovered in Turkish village

called Bogas Koi, an archive of the old Hittite Empire, which contained hundreds and hundreds of tablets, which were inscribed in Knieform writing. In the period of World War I, a Hungarian scholar called Bidrich Hosni showed that this language was an Indo-European language. By and by, a number of scholars studied the tablets and their contents revealed that we had there the royal archives of the Hittite Kingdom and Empire running between the 17th and 12th century BC. The study of these archives renewed the whole history of the Middle East in that period. Moreover, the discovery of this very old Indo-European language, some

of the documents were copies of all the documents going back to the 19th century BC, provided us with the oldest extant Indo-European documents in the original. And they showed the form of language, quite different in many respects from the type of Indo-European that had been reconstructed in the 19th century by German scholars like Karl Bruchmann, especially on the basis of Sanskrit and of Greek and other classical languages. The question was then, why was it so different? And this led to a lot of discussion at Hittite lost a lot of the characteristics of Indo-European in the environment of the Middle East and of the languages that existed there when the Hittites came to that part of the world, or did Hittite represent an older stage of Indo-European? The discussion is still going on, but nevertheless it seems

now that Hittite rather represents a very archaic stage of Indo-European, though in certain respects it has also innovated. It is a characteristic of every language. Dr. Jan Poovel is a specialist in the languages of Asia Minor at UCLA. His paper focused on philology and etymology in ancient languages, Dr. Poovel. Yesterday I spoke about the relationship of philology to etymology, that is to what extent you should really study that ancient texts deeply in order to understand the origins of words properly. The source is the derivations, the roots of verbs, that this cannot be done theoretically. You have to really get down to the documents themselves and find out exactly what the words meant thousands of years ago and how they were used and in other words try to understand also the cultures in which they operated through the texts in order to arrive at the proper appreciation of the origins of words. Indo-European is a kind of construct.

Indo-European is the assumed, the hypothetical origin of these various languages like Greek, Latin, English, ultimately. But so Hittite is one of the earliest attested of these so-called Indo-European languages. Dr. Carl Schmidt, professor of Compared in Linguistics from Bonn University, does research in the area of Celtic philology and Caucasian languages. He describes the nature of the problems that his research confronts. Dr. Schmidt. In general, we reconstruct the basis of relative chronology. But let me try to put it this way. We have several characteristics which give Celtic a distinct place within the Indo-European language family. We have for instance developments which come in to Celtic and Italic, Celtic and Latin, if you wish. And the other ones which are younger and they are common to Celtic and Germanic. So we might say that at the time when the cults were neighbors of the Germanic

tribes, something like a proto-language should have existed. This language must have separated. The Irish must have left the language rather early. But the Irish documentation is quite late. And what we have to do is to reconstruct on the basis of a modernized Celtic, of a modernized archaic type of Celtic. I would call Irish this way. Another archaic documentation are the Celtic and Indian inscriptions. The Celtic and Indian inscriptions are much older than the Irish texts. But unfortunately, there are no texts in the real sense of the word. They are only inscriptions and we don't know very much of the grammar of this language. Dr. Werner Winter is a professor of general linguistics and Indo-European from the University

of Kyle in West Germany. Dr. Werner describes the topic of his presentation. The claim has been that Armenian was extremely archaic and I checked out the material and came up with a different conclusion. Which is that Armenian shows innovations of its own and makes it appear just as changed as other Indo-European languages. So one cannot claim it as a direct proof for the theory that has been positive and so that theory has to rest on its own merits and cannot claim particular support from Armenian. The crucial thing was essentially what was the development which one could reconstruct as the earliest development in pre-Armenian but peculiar for this particular group. And the claim which had been made by the Soviet scholars that put forward this theory was that the Armenian stops work to KH, PhD, and that everything we have later on is

explainable as developments from these aspirates. And my looking at the data seemed to confirm something which I had proposed as early as the mid-50s that one should start from a development from of PTK first to F and then you could explain more readily the various subdevelopments you get in Armenian. So it's a very highly technical paper and it's not easy to communicate on these things because the language is relatively unknown and even a group like this you have not more than four or five people have worked with the language and then the problem is such it looks like an extremely trivial problem but then you see there are all kinds of where well subsidiary conclusions colonized you might build up on an assumption that Armenian was particularly archaic such as

that Armenian remained more or less in what the Soviet scholars consider the primeval home of the Indian Europeans whereas and I would be more inclined to say what what we have in Armenian shows strong traces of regional influence due to migration into the subcocation area. So it has pre-historical implications even though it does not immediately show them. You have of course speakers of Armenian, modern Armenian in large numbers in this country for instance you have a cluster around Fresno you have another group in the in the Boston area so it's not it's in this sense it's not difficult but of course what I'm dealing with is the Armenian that was in use 1500 years ago and that you can't find speakers. Dr Edgar Palame describes the relevance of the work of Dr. Calvert Watkins of Harvard

University. In the 50s considerable interest was shown for the existence in the European of a set of fixed formulas we had known for a long time that there were such things as the Homeric epithets where now an adjective where always appearing together like immortal glory for instance or two nouns where always juxtaposed for instance men and cattle etc etc and that these patterns would be recurrent all through the Indo-European field and the way they have persisted in the language until the present day that seems to show that there was a long standing poetic tradition in Indo-European which a professor Calvert Watkins as concentrated on. Dr. Watkins describes his presentation on formulaic sequences. What it is is a comparison or a study of how

certain set phrases that we call formulas are transmitted through time and show up in cognate languages sometimes those that that are particularly old say formulas like imperishable fame. There are little mini proverbs they express what is regarded as a value to to the society and they have a sort of internal dynamics to themselves they move in a certain way. In English we have things like expressions like might and main you do something with might and main and you never stop to think about it you just say that and you've learned it that way nobody ever uses either those words by themselves and you'd be hard put to say what what they mean but together these are what we speak of as a formulaic phrase and languages are full of them. A long standing role of IREX or the International Research and Exchange's Board

is to conduct exchanges of scholars between the USSR and institutions in the United States principally between the Academy of Science and Moscow and American Institutions. Dr. Polamay describes the work of academician Thomas V. Gamkhrilitsa a conference guest from the USSR. At the Congress of linguist in Oslo in 1957, Roman Jakobsson pointed out that the continental system of Indo-European as it was currently accepted by most scholars did not correspond to a system that was current in most of the languages of mankind and he thought therefore that typologically this was a rather rare system. This led to a number of discussions and efforts to find a better formulation or better reconstruction of the continental system of Indo-European and almost simultaneously to Soviet scholars Thomas Gamkhrilitsa and Vyacheslav V. Ivanov and an

American student former student of Dr. Lehmann, Professor Paul Hopper presented a new theory according to which Indo-European would have glotalized stops which would account for the later developments in a different way and this new theory called the glotalic theory is what seems now to be in the focus of the discussion as regards the phonology of Indo-European. Dr. Gamkhrilitsa addressed the conference. The top series in the new interpretation must be defined as glotalized instead of plain voiced voiced aspirates voiceless aspirates where aspiration is a fanatical relevant but phonemically redundant feature. This revision of the concernantism is known in current Indo-European comparative studies

as the glotalic theory which takes a new look at the proto-interpian linguistic model and its dichronic transformations into the historical Indo-European languages. On the catalic analysis, these transformations proved to be totally different from those traditionally assumed. The archaic proto-Indo-European stop inventory proved to be closer to those of languages traditionally viewed as having undergone later consonant shifts or loud-for-sheebel, Germanic, Armenian, Hitaid, while languages traditionally considered phonologically conservative and especially old Indian proved to have undergone complex phonemic transformations in their concernantism. The typological approach to linguistic reconstruction necessitates a radical reinterpretation and reformulation of all the basic comparative

work in Indo-European. I would like to recall in this connection Winfred Lemons words what had seemed one of the most solid achievements of 19th century linguistics is now modified in every section. The Iraq's conference on comparative linguistics, the Indo-European symposium, was sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts, the Departments of Linguistics, Germanic Languages, Oriental UnAfrican Languages and Literatures, and by the Centers for Middle Eastern Studies and for Asian Studies of the University of Texas at Austin in honor of Professor Winfred P. Lehman on the occasion of his retirement from active teaching. If you have a comment or wish to purchase a cassette copy of this program, write to forum,

a center for telecommunication services the University of Texas at Austin 78712. Our technical producer is Walter Morgan, our production assistant is David Archer, on your producer and host, Olive Graham. Forum is produced and distributed by the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, and is not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Texas at Austin or this station. This is the Longhorn Radio Network.