Indo-Europeanists - History of Indo-European Studies - Later Indo-European Studies

Later Indo-European Studies

The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from Bopp to August Schleicher's 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmann's Grundriss published from the 1880s. Brugmann's junggrammatische re-evaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussure's proposal of the concept of "consonantal schwa" (which later evolved into the laryngeal theory) may be considered the beginning of "contemporary" Indo-European studies. The Indo-European proto-language as described in the early 1900s in its main aspects is still accepted today, and the work done in the 20th century has been cleaning up and systematization, as well as the incorporation of new language material, notably the Anatolian and Tocharian branches unknown in the 19th century, into the Indo-European framework.

Notably, the laryngeal theory, in its early forms barely noticed except as a clever analysis, became mainstream after the 1927 discovery by Jerzy Kuryłowicz of the survival of at least some of these hypothetical phonemes in Anatolian. Julius Pokorny in 1959 published his Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, an updated and slimmed-down reworking of the three-volume Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der indogermanischen Sprachen of Alois Walde and Julius Pokorny (1927–32). Both of these works aim to provide an overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated until the early 20th century, but with only stray comments on the structure of individual forms; in Pokorny 1959, then-recent trends of morphology and phonology (e.g., the laryngeal theory), go unacknowledged, and he largely ignores Anatolian and Tocharian data.

The generation of Indo-Europeanists active in the last third of the 20th century, such as Oswald Szemerényi, Calvert Watkins, Warren Cowgill, Jochem Schindler, Helmut Rix, developed a better understanding of morphology and, in the wake of Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophonie, ablaut. The Lexicon of the Indo-European verbs edited by Rix appeared in 1997 as a first step towards a modernization of Pokorny's dictionary; a corresponding tome addressing the noun is in preparation . Current efforts are focused on a better understanding of the relative chronology within the proto-language, aiming at distinctions of "early", "middle" and "late", or "inner" and "outer" PIE dialects, but a general consensus has yet to form. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian began to be of a certainty sufficient to allow it influence the image of the proto-language, see also Indo-Hittite.

Such attempts at recovering a sense of historical depth in PIE have been coupled with efforts towards coupling the history of the language with archaeology, notably with the Kurgan hypothesis. J. P. Mallory's 1989 In Search of the Indo-Europeans and 1997 Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture gives an overview of this. Purely linguistic research was assisted by attempts to reconstruct the culture and religion of the Proto-Indo-Europeans by scholars such as Georges Dumézil, as well as by archaeology (e. g. Marija Gimbutas, Colin Renfrew) and genetics (e. g. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza). These speculations about the realia of Proto-Indo-European culture are however not part of the field of comparative linguistics, but rather a sister-discipline.

Some concepts of Indo-European studies also influenced the Nazis. (See Aryan Race). In the period after World War II, several Indo-European scholars (e.g. Roger Pearson, Jean Haudry and the influential Georges Dumézil) and writers influenced by Indo-European studies (e.g. Alain de Benoist) were accused of having sympathies for Fascism or Nazism, and it was alleged that their political beliefs may have influenced their studies. Arvidsson speculated that the fact that many Indo-European scholars identify themselves as the descendants of the ancient Indo-Europeans may explain why the field of Indo-European studies has also been ideologically abused. Anthony remarked that "Indo-European linguistics and archaeology have been exploited to support openly ideological agendas for so long that a brief history of the issue quickly becomes entangled with the intellectual history of Europe."

In the 20th century, great progress was made due to the discovery of more language material belonging to the Indo-European family, and by advances in comparative linguistics, by scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure.