Kristian Kristiansen, Guus Kroonen and Eske Willerslev. The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited. Integrating Archaeology, Genetics, and Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2023, 575 pp. ISBN: 978-1009261746. Online ISBN: 9781009261753 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009261753
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: This important volume is the publication of a colloquium held in Gothenburg in May 2018 on the Indo-European question, i.e. on the historical explanation of the emergence of the Indo-European language family, languages which, today, are spoken in a large part of the world.The book brings together contributions from over thirty researchers from Denmark, Russia, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Ireland.It is coordinated by Kristian Kristiansen, a world-renowned archaeologist who was the first president of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA); Guus Kroonen, a linguist specialising in Germanic languages, and Eske Willerslev, who directs palaeogenomic research at the University of Copenhagen, one of the leading laboratories in this field.The Indo-European question emerged at least three centuries ago when the German philosopher Leibniz pondered the relationship between Indo-European languages in his Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain (1704, in French).He (already) saw their origins in the Black Sea regions.Anglo-Saxon historiography usually attributes the discovery of the kinship of European languages to the colonial administrator William Jones, but forgets that there is no linguistic demonstration in his famous lecture delivered in Calcutta in 1786 and that he concludes by saying: "The Hindus [...] had an immemorial affinity with the old Persians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians; the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Tuscans; the Scythians or Goths, and Celts; the Chinese, Japanese, and Peruvians; whence, [...] we may fairly conclude that they all proceeded from some central country"-an assertion that would normally come under the heading of 'scientific madness'.It was German philology, with Bopp, Schleicher and finally the school known as the 'New Grammarians', that defined the precise relationships between these languages and put forward the hypothesis of an original language (Ursprache), spoken somewhere in an original home
Source: Trabajos de Prehistoria
DOI: 10.3989/tp.2024.998
Author: Jean-Paul Demoule
Institution: Institut Universitaire de France
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4403397827