EurasianStudies_0110..

January-March 2010 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume II., Issue 1.
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DI GIOVINE, Paolo
The Issue of the Language Families in the Light of Recent Research
Paper presented at the Round Table held at the Hungarian Academy of Science in Rome, on the
21 st of October 2009, on the occasion of ‘The Year of the Hungarian Language’:
“The issue of the language families: the Indo-European and the Finno-Ugric families”
1. The coming into being of the concept of “language family”.
The concept of ‘language family’, that is, the existence of a group of languages sharing a set of
correlations that can be accounted for in terms of genetic descent and can be represented through a
family tree diagram, goes back to the Finno-Ugric (FU) linguistics of the late eighteenth century (with
Sámuel Gyarmathi and, before him, János Sajnovics and Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro).
From the field of FU studies this genealogical linguistic model has been introduced into the field of
Indo-European (IE) studies first by Rask and Bopp, then – in a more explicit formulation – by Schleicher
(as is known). Thus, the IE studies are in debt to FU studies for the acquisition of the concept of language
family. This being the case, should now the IE studies abandon this concept to keep up with recent
developments in FU studies, where the family tree model has been recognised as not fit for the purpose 1,
and therefore rejected? Yes and no, not so fast, as the British colleagues would say.
2. The criteria for reconstructing genetic relationships.
The lexical correlations do not constitute a reliable evidence of genetic relations – contrary to what
was commonly believed during the pre-scientific phase of historical linguistics – since words can travel
long distances (see for example the numerous exotic words that entered the Western languages, as
discussed in Mancini (1990)). In reality, the hypothesis of the existence of a genetic relationship among
the IE languages – relationship that is linguistic only, I should emphasize – appears to be the necessary
conclusion if we consider the following facts:
-> the IE languages are connected by phonological correspondences, that is: it is possible to trace back
the phoneme inventory of two or more languages having similar structure to an older phase of
development and, whereby these inventories ‘converge’ and correspond to each other; they can therefore
be reconstructed;
* The first part of a report on this Round Table was published in the October-December 2009 issue of our Journal, pp. 25-40. This
paper was translated from Italian into English by Angela Marcantonio. [Ed. Journal of Eurasian Studies]
1 On the non-validity of the Uralic theory see Marcantonio (2002).
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