03-22-2007, 12:42 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> Husky, challenge to the AIT fancies had started even before Vivekananda or Aurobindo. Credit goes, several decades before them, to Madame HP Blavatsky and her Theosophical Soceity, who were probably the first to openly challenge these theories.Â
Also Maharshi Dayanand Saraswati in 1860s (before Vivekananda) challenged such 'explanations' to the origin of Sanskritam. Although at some point in time, he did seem to harbour the opinion that 'Aryans' were a people, who did inhabitate India as their first home of choice. [right][snapback]65946[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I will follow-up on these superb leads. I will argue that IEL is NOT necessary for studying bharatiya languages, their formation and evolution. kalyan
To study language, choose bhaashya, reject IEL
http://docs.google.com/View?docID=ajhwbk..._620hs8zfc This monograph makes a plea for reclaiming bhaashya, study of bharatiya languages rejecting Indo-European Linguistics (IEL) which is a belief system. Arguments advanced by Koerner (see excerpts below) add urgency to this plea. Study of language in IEL was driven by ideology. As Koerner notes: " Marx, in The German Ideology written during 1845-1846, followed up on Napoleon's negative slant and used the term to refer to a false consciousness that is contradicted by the reality found in everyday material life. `Ideology' has since been much more a term of abuse than a well-defined concept of scholarly discourse. " Ideology is, simply, a cop-out, while hypocritically trying to provide a veneer of integrity in an essentially non-falsifiable discipline called IEL. Ideology meant rejection of reality. Bhaashya underscores reality. Patanjali notes that to study language, one does not go to a grammarian. We may add that one should go to a child who develops the language competence and establishes language as a social contract. We need to re-define study of language as bhaasha pariccheda (a treatise on nyaaya), in an objective pursuit to delineate contours of general semantics, recognition of meaning in children's words pouring forth as language to communicate in society and to advance knowledge systems for abhyudayam and nihs'reyas.
Thanks to Mayuresh Kelkar for the following URL.
kalyan
Linguistics and ideology in the study of language
by EFK Koerner (2001)
Excerpts:
â¦my paper deals with the discipline, the profession of linguistics, not language uses and linguistic discourses of any kind, if `linguistic' is interpreted in the sense of German sprachlich (French langagier), i.e., "pertaining to language", not sprachwissenschaftlich (French linguistique)⦠The present paper deals with only three areas of long-standing scholarly research, namely, 1) `mother tongue' studies, 2) linguistic typology, and, in particular, 3) the search for the original Indo-European homeland in order to illustrate that these subjects were hardly ever argued without an ideological subtext⦠Mother-tongue ideologies in linguistics Christopher Hutton, in his very recent Linguistics and the Third Reich (Hutton 1998) has focused his attention on the idea of `mother tongue' in fact he speaks of `mother-tongue fascism' in German linguistics and how this emotionally charged concept, advocated by seemingly respectable representatives in the field of Germanistik could find themselves supporting the agenda of an anti-Semitic and xenophobic regimeâ¦
Language classification and typology ⦠Interestingly, embedded in the first 19th-century proposals of linguistic typology we find an implicit ideological underpinning. I may begin by referring to Friedrich Schlegel's (17721829) scheme distinguishing between so-called `inflectional' languages, i.e., the Indo-European languages, and those that have no inflection and are therefore called `isolating' (as Chinese has usually been thought of) or use a morphological technique which puts strings of forms to gether, but does not allow for a modification of the root, i.e., the so-called `agglutinating' languages (as American Indian languages are supposed to be like). This is found in nuce in Schlegel's 1808 Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, including the suggestion, albeit not explicit, of a ranking of the `inflectional' languages as farther developed and, hence, superior to all others. We may say, when looking at later developments in the field: first the languages are the target, then their respective speakers. Friedrich Schlegel's elder brother August Wilhelm (17671845) added the `synthetic'/`analytic' distinction in 1818, and we can find similar typological arguments in Wilhelm von Humboldt (17671835), in whose view the highest achievement of the human mind was that of the speakers of Ancient Greekâ¦The connection between language and the people who speak it has always been there, of course; it just needed to be argued that some languages and hence their speakers were more `primitive' than others. For instance, Franz Bopp (17911867), the supposed `founder' of comparative Indo-European linguistics, who, unlike his former student Au gust Friedrich Pott (18021887) and later August Schleicher (18211868), argued against the use of the term Indogermanisch (Indo-Germanic) and in favour of `Indo-European' as a more universal and, I suppose, `neutral' term, could be shown to have made connections, if not a direct identification, between language structure and the cultural state of its speakersâ¦Contrary to what Humboldt had argued for, namely, that the Melanesian lan guages constituted a language family unto themselves, and not at all related to Indo-European, Bopp maintained, ap parently being misled by the huge mass of loanwords found in these languages which could be traced back to Sanskrit, that they were indeed Indo-European. However, since the Melanesian languages showed, unlike Sanskrit, next to no inflec tion, Bopp remarked that their speakers had shed them as they had shed their clothes! (Bopp 1840b; cf. Buschmann's 1842 reply). In other words, in what started out as a strictly linguistic analysis, a parallel was drawn between the people on these tropical islands and the structure of their language (cf. Mueller-Vollmer 1993, for a detailed account of this sordid story). Similar, totally unqualified remarks could be found elsewhere in 19th-century linguistic scholarship. They were not systematic arguments, but they could be picked up by people with an antenna for them. For instance, in Schleicher's (18211868) Die Sprachen Europas, which contains important typological observations about languages throughout the world, not only Europe, we could also find the author passing a value judgment on English and by extension the English for their `debased' (herabgesunken) language (Schleicher 1850:231; cf. Koerner 1995b:156-158)â¦
The search for the original Indo-European homeland ⦠here again the focus in Mallory's (1976[1973]) overview has been on the various theories, linguistic, archaeological or other ( e.g., historical, cultural, religious) advanced since the 18th century, mostly deriving from linguistic endeavours, with extralinguistic considerations becoming more evident during the second half of the 19th century. Although it is obvious from his own account that a considerable number of authors had ideological, including at times religious and maybe even political, agenda, Mallory does not raise the issue of ideology, quite in line with traditional scholarly discourse in which this aspect of scientific endeavour has been regularly ignoredâ¦Both linguists and archaeologists have been obsessed with the desire to pinpoint the location of the homeland of the Indo-Europeans since the beginning of our studies, and their search has unfortunately not always been devoid of political motivation: the Germany of the 1930's and 1940's was locating it within the frontiers of the Great Reich; after Stalin's discovery of "real" linguistics [in 1950], [], some Soviet linguists placed it in the Slavic territory when dealing with the prehistory of the Russian language; []. (Polomé 1995:281). .. Sir William Jones, in 1792, still adhered largely to traditional biblical scholarship, which set the date of the Flood as about 2,350 B.C.; his suggestion for the Urheimat was today's Iran (Persia). By the 19th century the idea of Hebrew as the lingua Adamica had been abandoned, and Babel was no longer used as an explanation for the varieties of languages in the world, though some of these ideas lingered on among members of the educated public. For the first generation of comparative-historical linguists, the general idea was that it must have been in Asia, not Europe. For Friedrich Schlegel (1808) it was clear that the original home of the Indo-Europeans must have been India, and Bopp followed him on this and many other ideas advanced by Schlegel. For Rask (1818) it was Asia Minor . The concept of ex oriente lux held sway for them and others at the time. By the mid-19th century, the situation began to change. For instance, while Schleicher (1850) proposed the Caspian Sea area as a possible location of the original seat of the Indo-European peoples, the British not German scholar Robert Gordon Latham (18121888) argued in favour of Lithuania rather than the Indo-Iranian area (Latham 1851). And from about that time onwards we can see the number of possible homelands proposed, not always by linguists but also by archaeologists, cultural historians, and amateur writers, beginning to multiply: from Anatolia to the Balkans, from the southern Russian steppes to northern Europe, to central Europe, and eventually to Germany. The arguments in favour of a particular location were manifold, and varied according to the authors' expertise, personal interests or beliefs and, maybe, prejudices. They could be based on matters of climate, geography, history, archaeology, myth, religion, and of course lan guage. More often than not, people seem to have picked a `pet' location first, and then engaged in selecting their `evidence' from any field in support of their `theory'. Adolphe Pictet's (17991875) introduction of `paléontologie linguistique' into the discussion in 1859 added a few more arguments to the debate, not all of them beneficial to the subsequent history of the subject. Pictet made an effort to re construct, on the basis of what could be regarded as the common vocabulary of Indo-European before the separation of the language into different subfamilies, indications of the shared experience, the flora and fauna, of these peoples, whose homeland he placed in India and Persia. Pictet used the term `Aryan' originally a linguistic term which the Indo-Iranians had applied to themselves (even though it is correct to say that it was meant by the Indo-Iranians to distinguish them selves from other ethnic groups) to also characterize these people as representing a superior race. (Cf. Trautmann (1997) on how British orientalism reveals the mutual reinforcement of linguistics and race theory from Sir William Jones' Ninth Anniversary Discourse (1792) onward throughout the entire 19th century and beyond, just to dispel the idea that `Aryanism' was a typically continental European idea.)⦠So when Edgar Glässer publishes an Einführung in die rassenkundliche Sprachforschung in 1939, much what can be found in there, including the chauvinism, follows much of long-standing scholarship. As Hutton (1998:48) puts it, "Glässer has served as a convenient `fall-guy' in various accounts of Nazi linguistics, but his `racial' linguistics was no more or less chauvinist than the `mother-tongue' linguistics of Kloss and Weisgerber." To return to the 19th century for a moment, racialist and what we now would call `white supremacist' views can be traced without any trouble in many scholarly writings, and to dispel the impression that it was largely a German affair, I could refer to books by American authors where we find such ideas expressed, one book entitled Lectures on the Arya (Pike 1873), another The Aryan Race: Its origin and achievements (Morris 1888), the latter affirming "all the savage tribes of the earth belong to the Negro or Mongolian race [], the Caucasian is pre-eminently the man of civilization" ( pp.23-24), and that it were these Caucasians who had "perfected the Aryan method of language" (p. 51). (Let us remember, however, that `Aryan' was widely used in lieu of `Indo-European' in the Anglo-Saxon world, at least until the early 20th century, and certainly not always with `supremacist' undertones.)
As we know, head shapes, skin pigmentation, hair colour and type (curley, straight, etc.) were taken as particular features to classify races or as we might prefer to call them today ethnic type, and we remember from Nazi progaganda that the so-called Nordic race was blond and supposedly exhibited an elongated head form (though it was only one of the race types admitted by the Nazis to the `Aryan' fold. (In fact there were altogether six recognized categories nordisch, westisch, ostisch, dinarisch , ostbaltisch anf fälisch (Hutton 1998:323n.2) how else could Hitler, Goering, or Goebbels themselves have satisfied the `nordic' characteristics of blondness, trimness, or able-bodiness unless all sorts of allowances were made in Nazi discourse?)â¦
Post-World War II theories of the Indo-European homeland ⦠In her 1994 M.A. thesis, Katrin S. Krell has taken the time and effort to compare a series of lexical items reconstructed in Gamkrelidze & Ivanov (1994[1984]) and cited in other publications of theirs with the various available etymological dictionaries of Proto-Indo-European reconstructions and/or available cognates (Buck 1949, Pokorny 1959, Mann 1984, Watkins 1992), and found that there are simply no such lexemes to support, for instance, the following affirmation made by these scholars: Some of these animals [ i.e., `panther', `lion', `elephant', `crab', `monkey'] are specific to the southern geographic region, which rules out central Europe as a possible territory of habitation of the Indo-Europan tribes []. (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1985a:11; Krell 1994:41-42). Likewise, reconstruction such as *Hwei- "bird", *kher- "crow, raven", *theth(e)r- "black grouse", and several other reconstructions by Gamkrelidze & Ivanov are not paralleled by any of the four above-cited authorities (Krell 1994:42). As the authors make an all-out effort to support their argument that early Indo-Europeans were agriculturalists, not (as Gimbutas and others would have it) essentially pastoralists with animal raising as their major food supply, they offer an array of reconstructions such as the following: *solkhu- "furrow", *serph- "sickle", *(e)s-en- "time of harvest", and *k'orau- "millstone", none of which are supported by Buck and the other scholars. By contrast, while there are indeed terms for `to plow' and `to sow' in the Indo-European lexicon in these dictionaries which would suggest that the Indo-Europeans had some familiarity with agricultural practice, there seem to be common words for `pasture (noun and verb)', `wool', and others not mentioned by Gamkrelidze & Ivanov, which are well attested in Pokorny (1959), Mann (1984), and Watkins (1992) such as those meaning such things as "to break in a horse", "to ride", and "to milk" (Krell 1994:45). Given these few examples, it would be rather difficult to decide, on palaeonotological grounds, in favour of the claim that our Indo-European ancestors were indeed agriculturalists, as the archaeologist Renfrew (1987) has argued on different grounds, but which Gamkrelidze (1990) supported enthusiastically, although their relative chronologies are some two thousand years apartâ¦
Desiderata in the linguistic historiography of past centuries Recent publications in other fields such as archaeology ( e.g., Arnold & Hassmann 1995) and folklore (e.g., Dow & Lixfeld 1994) have suggested it to me that the field of linguistics likewise was in need of similar kind of soul searchingâ¦In fact, Hutton's Linguistics and the Third Reich (1998) investigates by no means solely those horrendous twelve years of German history, but goes back well into the mid-19th century and even as far back as Sir William Jones' famous `philologer' passage of 1786 in an attempt to explain what is generally and erroneously taken as an aberration in linguistics (and other disciplines) during the 19331945 period in Germany where indeed we have to do with a complex of ideas and theories with a long scholarly tradition. Hutton's work brought home to me the urgency and heightened recognition that much more careful, detailed, and honest research needs to be undertaken in order to come to grips with what really happened in linguistics during the Nazi period and to what extent, apart from the particular external, political conditions which produced a certain number of careerists and a few charlatans, linguistics was indeed conducted along lines different from what had been done beforeâ¦
In other words, lest linguistic historiography be regarded as an exercise which takes `the high road' and chooses to leave difficult issues out of its (often `triumphalist') narrative, the field must learn to accept that linguistics, past and present, has never been `value free', but has often been subject to a variety of external influences and opinions, not all of them beneficial to either the discipline itself or the society that sustains it. In the final analysis, it comes to a matter of prise de conscience and of intellectual honesty and responsibility that linguists must become aware of the possible uses and abuses to which their research posture and their findings have been and could be put. Let us not be misled: the `generative paradigm' of so-called `modern linguistics' associated with the name of Noam Chomsky, both in its theoretical claims ( e.g., `universal grammar') and its research practice is far from being devoid of ideological content. To demonstrate this, however, would amount to another research project.
http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/LangIdeo/K...erner.html
See: Koerner, E.F.K . 2001. "Linguistics and Ideology in 19th and 20th Century Studies of Language". In Language and Ideology , Dirven, René, Bruce Hawkins and Esra Sandikcioglu (eds.), 253â276
Also Maharshi Dayanand Saraswati in 1860s (before Vivekananda) challenged such 'explanations' to the origin of Sanskritam. Although at some point in time, he did seem to harbour the opinion that 'Aryans' were a people, who did inhabitate India as their first home of choice. [right][snapback]65946[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I will follow-up on these superb leads. I will argue that IEL is NOT necessary for studying bharatiya languages, their formation and evolution. kalyan
To study language, choose bhaashya, reject IEL
http://docs.google.com/View?docID=ajhwbk..._620hs8zfc This monograph makes a plea for reclaiming bhaashya, study of bharatiya languages rejecting Indo-European Linguistics (IEL) which is a belief system. Arguments advanced by Koerner (see excerpts below) add urgency to this plea. Study of language in IEL was driven by ideology. As Koerner notes: " Marx, in The German Ideology written during 1845-1846, followed up on Napoleon's negative slant and used the term to refer to a false consciousness that is contradicted by the reality found in everyday material life. `Ideology' has since been much more a term of abuse than a well-defined concept of scholarly discourse. " Ideology is, simply, a cop-out, while hypocritically trying to provide a veneer of integrity in an essentially non-falsifiable discipline called IEL. Ideology meant rejection of reality. Bhaashya underscores reality. Patanjali notes that to study language, one does not go to a grammarian. We may add that one should go to a child who develops the language competence and establishes language as a social contract. We need to re-define study of language as bhaasha pariccheda (a treatise on nyaaya), in an objective pursuit to delineate contours of general semantics, recognition of meaning in children's words pouring forth as language to communicate in society and to advance knowledge systems for abhyudayam and nihs'reyas.
Thanks to Mayuresh Kelkar for the following URL.
kalyan
Linguistics and ideology in the study of language
by EFK Koerner (2001)
Excerpts:
â¦my paper deals with the discipline, the profession of linguistics, not language uses and linguistic discourses of any kind, if `linguistic' is interpreted in the sense of German sprachlich (French langagier), i.e., "pertaining to language", not sprachwissenschaftlich (French linguistique)⦠The present paper deals with only three areas of long-standing scholarly research, namely, 1) `mother tongue' studies, 2) linguistic typology, and, in particular, 3) the search for the original Indo-European homeland in order to illustrate that these subjects were hardly ever argued without an ideological subtext⦠Mother-tongue ideologies in linguistics Christopher Hutton, in his very recent Linguistics and the Third Reich (Hutton 1998) has focused his attention on the idea of `mother tongue' in fact he speaks of `mother-tongue fascism' in German linguistics and how this emotionally charged concept, advocated by seemingly respectable representatives in the field of Germanistik could find themselves supporting the agenda of an anti-Semitic and xenophobic regimeâ¦
Language classification and typology ⦠Interestingly, embedded in the first 19th-century proposals of linguistic typology we find an implicit ideological underpinning. I may begin by referring to Friedrich Schlegel's (17721829) scheme distinguishing between so-called `inflectional' languages, i.e., the Indo-European languages, and those that have no inflection and are therefore called `isolating' (as Chinese has usually been thought of) or use a morphological technique which puts strings of forms to gether, but does not allow for a modification of the root, i.e., the so-called `agglutinating' languages (as American Indian languages are supposed to be like). This is found in nuce in Schlegel's 1808 Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, including the suggestion, albeit not explicit, of a ranking of the `inflectional' languages as farther developed and, hence, superior to all others. We may say, when looking at later developments in the field: first the languages are the target, then their respective speakers. Friedrich Schlegel's elder brother August Wilhelm (17671845) added the `synthetic'/`analytic' distinction in 1818, and we can find similar typological arguments in Wilhelm von Humboldt (17671835), in whose view the highest achievement of the human mind was that of the speakers of Ancient Greekâ¦The connection between language and the people who speak it has always been there, of course; it just needed to be argued that some languages and hence their speakers were more `primitive' than others. For instance, Franz Bopp (17911867), the supposed `founder' of comparative Indo-European linguistics, who, unlike his former student Au gust Friedrich Pott (18021887) and later August Schleicher (18211868), argued against the use of the term Indogermanisch (Indo-Germanic) and in favour of `Indo-European' as a more universal and, I suppose, `neutral' term, could be shown to have made connections, if not a direct identification, between language structure and the cultural state of its speakersâ¦Contrary to what Humboldt had argued for, namely, that the Melanesian lan guages constituted a language family unto themselves, and not at all related to Indo-European, Bopp maintained, ap parently being misled by the huge mass of loanwords found in these languages which could be traced back to Sanskrit, that they were indeed Indo-European. However, since the Melanesian languages showed, unlike Sanskrit, next to no inflec tion, Bopp remarked that their speakers had shed them as they had shed their clothes! (Bopp 1840b; cf. Buschmann's 1842 reply). In other words, in what started out as a strictly linguistic analysis, a parallel was drawn between the people on these tropical islands and the structure of their language (cf. Mueller-Vollmer 1993, for a detailed account of this sordid story). Similar, totally unqualified remarks could be found elsewhere in 19th-century linguistic scholarship. They were not systematic arguments, but they could be picked up by people with an antenna for them. For instance, in Schleicher's (18211868) Die Sprachen Europas, which contains important typological observations about languages throughout the world, not only Europe, we could also find the author passing a value judgment on English and by extension the English for their `debased' (herabgesunken) language (Schleicher 1850:231; cf. Koerner 1995b:156-158)â¦
The search for the original Indo-European homeland ⦠here again the focus in Mallory's (1976[1973]) overview has been on the various theories, linguistic, archaeological or other ( e.g., historical, cultural, religious) advanced since the 18th century, mostly deriving from linguistic endeavours, with extralinguistic considerations becoming more evident during the second half of the 19th century. Although it is obvious from his own account that a considerable number of authors had ideological, including at times religious and maybe even political, agenda, Mallory does not raise the issue of ideology, quite in line with traditional scholarly discourse in which this aspect of scientific endeavour has been regularly ignoredâ¦Both linguists and archaeologists have been obsessed with the desire to pinpoint the location of the homeland of the Indo-Europeans since the beginning of our studies, and their search has unfortunately not always been devoid of political motivation: the Germany of the 1930's and 1940's was locating it within the frontiers of the Great Reich; after Stalin's discovery of "real" linguistics [in 1950], [], some Soviet linguists placed it in the Slavic territory when dealing with the prehistory of the Russian language; []. (Polomé 1995:281). .. Sir William Jones, in 1792, still adhered largely to traditional biblical scholarship, which set the date of the Flood as about 2,350 B.C.; his suggestion for the Urheimat was today's Iran (Persia). By the 19th century the idea of Hebrew as the lingua Adamica had been abandoned, and Babel was no longer used as an explanation for the varieties of languages in the world, though some of these ideas lingered on among members of the educated public. For the first generation of comparative-historical linguists, the general idea was that it must have been in Asia, not Europe. For Friedrich Schlegel (1808) it was clear that the original home of the Indo-Europeans must have been India, and Bopp followed him on this and many other ideas advanced by Schlegel. For Rask (1818) it was Asia Minor . The concept of ex oriente lux held sway for them and others at the time. By the mid-19th century, the situation began to change. For instance, while Schleicher (1850) proposed the Caspian Sea area as a possible location of the original seat of the Indo-European peoples, the British not German scholar Robert Gordon Latham (18121888) argued in favour of Lithuania rather than the Indo-Iranian area (Latham 1851). And from about that time onwards we can see the number of possible homelands proposed, not always by linguists but also by archaeologists, cultural historians, and amateur writers, beginning to multiply: from Anatolia to the Balkans, from the southern Russian steppes to northern Europe, to central Europe, and eventually to Germany. The arguments in favour of a particular location were manifold, and varied according to the authors' expertise, personal interests or beliefs and, maybe, prejudices. They could be based on matters of climate, geography, history, archaeology, myth, religion, and of course lan guage. More often than not, people seem to have picked a `pet' location first, and then engaged in selecting their `evidence' from any field in support of their `theory'. Adolphe Pictet's (17991875) introduction of `paléontologie linguistique' into the discussion in 1859 added a few more arguments to the debate, not all of them beneficial to the subsequent history of the subject. Pictet made an effort to re construct, on the basis of what could be regarded as the common vocabulary of Indo-European before the separation of the language into different subfamilies, indications of the shared experience, the flora and fauna, of these peoples, whose homeland he placed in India and Persia. Pictet used the term `Aryan' originally a linguistic term which the Indo-Iranians had applied to themselves (even though it is correct to say that it was meant by the Indo-Iranians to distinguish them selves from other ethnic groups) to also characterize these people as representing a superior race. (Cf. Trautmann (1997) on how British orientalism reveals the mutual reinforcement of linguistics and race theory from Sir William Jones' Ninth Anniversary Discourse (1792) onward throughout the entire 19th century and beyond, just to dispel the idea that `Aryanism' was a typically continental European idea.)⦠So when Edgar Glässer publishes an Einführung in die rassenkundliche Sprachforschung in 1939, much what can be found in there, including the chauvinism, follows much of long-standing scholarship. As Hutton (1998:48) puts it, "Glässer has served as a convenient `fall-guy' in various accounts of Nazi linguistics, but his `racial' linguistics was no more or less chauvinist than the `mother-tongue' linguistics of Kloss and Weisgerber." To return to the 19th century for a moment, racialist and what we now would call `white supremacist' views can be traced without any trouble in many scholarly writings, and to dispel the impression that it was largely a German affair, I could refer to books by American authors where we find such ideas expressed, one book entitled Lectures on the Arya (Pike 1873), another The Aryan Race: Its origin and achievements (Morris 1888), the latter affirming "all the savage tribes of the earth belong to the Negro or Mongolian race [], the Caucasian is pre-eminently the man of civilization" ( pp.23-24), and that it were these Caucasians who had "perfected the Aryan method of language" (p. 51). (Let us remember, however, that `Aryan' was widely used in lieu of `Indo-European' in the Anglo-Saxon world, at least until the early 20th century, and certainly not always with `supremacist' undertones.)
As we know, head shapes, skin pigmentation, hair colour and type (curley, straight, etc.) were taken as particular features to classify races or as we might prefer to call them today ethnic type, and we remember from Nazi progaganda that the so-called Nordic race was blond and supposedly exhibited an elongated head form (though it was only one of the race types admitted by the Nazis to the `Aryan' fold. (In fact there were altogether six recognized categories nordisch, westisch, ostisch, dinarisch , ostbaltisch anf fälisch (Hutton 1998:323n.2) how else could Hitler, Goering, or Goebbels themselves have satisfied the `nordic' characteristics of blondness, trimness, or able-bodiness unless all sorts of allowances were made in Nazi discourse?)â¦
Post-World War II theories of the Indo-European homeland ⦠In her 1994 M.A. thesis, Katrin S. Krell has taken the time and effort to compare a series of lexical items reconstructed in Gamkrelidze & Ivanov (1994[1984]) and cited in other publications of theirs with the various available etymological dictionaries of Proto-Indo-European reconstructions and/or available cognates (Buck 1949, Pokorny 1959, Mann 1984, Watkins 1992), and found that there are simply no such lexemes to support, for instance, the following affirmation made by these scholars: Some of these animals [ i.e., `panther', `lion', `elephant', `crab', `monkey'] are specific to the southern geographic region, which rules out central Europe as a possible territory of habitation of the Indo-Europan tribes []. (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1985a:11; Krell 1994:41-42). Likewise, reconstruction such as *Hwei- "bird", *kher- "crow, raven", *theth(e)r- "black grouse", and several other reconstructions by Gamkrelidze & Ivanov are not paralleled by any of the four above-cited authorities (Krell 1994:42). As the authors make an all-out effort to support their argument that early Indo-Europeans were agriculturalists, not (as Gimbutas and others would have it) essentially pastoralists with animal raising as their major food supply, they offer an array of reconstructions such as the following: *solkhu- "furrow", *serph- "sickle", *(e)s-en- "time of harvest", and *k'orau- "millstone", none of which are supported by Buck and the other scholars. By contrast, while there are indeed terms for `to plow' and `to sow' in the Indo-European lexicon in these dictionaries which would suggest that the Indo-Europeans had some familiarity with agricultural practice, there seem to be common words for `pasture (noun and verb)', `wool', and others not mentioned by Gamkrelidze & Ivanov, which are well attested in Pokorny (1959), Mann (1984), and Watkins (1992) such as those meaning such things as "to break in a horse", "to ride", and "to milk" (Krell 1994:45). Given these few examples, it would be rather difficult to decide, on palaeonotological grounds, in favour of the claim that our Indo-European ancestors were indeed agriculturalists, as the archaeologist Renfrew (1987) has argued on different grounds, but which Gamkrelidze (1990) supported enthusiastically, although their relative chronologies are some two thousand years apartâ¦
Desiderata in the linguistic historiography of past centuries Recent publications in other fields such as archaeology ( e.g., Arnold & Hassmann 1995) and folklore (e.g., Dow & Lixfeld 1994) have suggested it to me that the field of linguistics likewise was in need of similar kind of soul searchingâ¦In fact, Hutton's Linguistics and the Third Reich (1998) investigates by no means solely those horrendous twelve years of German history, but goes back well into the mid-19th century and even as far back as Sir William Jones' famous `philologer' passage of 1786 in an attempt to explain what is generally and erroneously taken as an aberration in linguistics (and other disciplines) during the 19331945 period in Germany where indeed we have to do with a complex of ideas and theories with a long scholarly tradition. Hutton's work brought home to me the urgency and heightened recognition that much more careful, detailed, and honest research needs to be undertaken in order to come to grips with what really happened in linguistics during the Nazi period and to what extent, apart from the particular external, political conditions which produced a certain number of careerists and a few charlatans, linguistics was indeed conducted along lines different from what had been done beforeâ¦
In other words, lest linguistic historiography be regarded as an exercise which takes `the high road' and chooses to leave difficult issues out of its (often `triumphalist') narrative, the field must learn to accept that linguistics, past and present, has never been `value free', but has often been subject to a variety of external influences and opinions, not all of them beneficial to either the discipline itself or the society that sustains it. In the final analysis, it comes to a matter of prise de conscience and of intellectual honesty and responsibility that linguists must become aware of the possible uses and abuses to which their research posture and their findings have been and could be put. Let us not be misled: the `generative paradigm' of so-called `modern linguistics' associated with the name of Noam Chomsky, both in its theoretical claims ( e.g., `universal grammar') and its research practice is far from being devoid of ideological content. To demonstrate this, however, would amount to another research project.
http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/LangIdeo/K...erner.html
See: Koerner, E.F.K . 2001. "Linguistics and Ideology in 19th and 20th Century Studies of Language". In Language and Ideology , Dirven, René, Bruce Hawkins and Esra Sandikcioglu (eds.), 253â276