JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES

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October-December 2009 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume I., Issue 4. _____________________________________________________________________________________ frightening. The question marks, the experts challenging the views of their colleagues, etc. are signs that the IE studies are active and healthy. As for the historical, or better, pre-historical new archaeology (since the revolutionary new paradigm proposed by Sir Colin Renfrew), the trouble is that instead of 2-3 thousand years of IE past, today we might look back into 5 or more thousand years. And, if the written documents cannot be dated back to many thousands of years, we have only to speculate about the existence of the oral tradition, transmitted by hundreds of generations, ‘la longue durée’. In the 19 th Century, at the most optimistic phase of IE linguistics, excellent scholars were busy working on reconstructing not only the words and the morphological patterns of Proto-IE, but also accents and phrases, etc. I still hope that this is in principle not an impossible task, but I do not think that the available historical documents permit a reliable reconstruction. And here a major trouble is emerging: 19 th Century linguistics was evolutionary in kind, whilst today we are more skeptical about this. At that time scholars had in mind a strict system of phonemes, word classes, grammatical rules and sound changes. Any model, especially the ‘family tree’, would do. Today quite the opposite appears to be the case. Marcantonio’s life work Leitmotiv is to challenge those simple ‘regularities’. Nevertheless, despite all skepticism, the fact remains that languages develop not just by caprice, on the contrary: languages follow patterns, regularities and even laws. It is not easy to explain why Hungarian (not at all an IE language) is using a satem word, száz, to indicate ‘100’, but this is a fact, and the corresponding Finnish word sata makes the explanation even more complex. We can have several theories to explain the facts, but there is no way to disregard or forget them, or to suggest that Finnish and Hungarian are IE languages. The twelve authors featuring in the volume under discussion come from different parts of the world. Many work today in the United States; others represent Germany, England or Greece. I am happy to realize that there are three Italians among them. One could cry for ‘more balance’ (which might include French, Russian, Indian or Persian linguists too). But it is simply impossible to balance everything in one volume. The authors do not belong to any ‘close circuit’, and their similarity may be characterized by the fact that they are very modern scholars. With a few exceptions, their first publications, devoted to the topics under discussion, date back to about a dozen of years. We may state that they are all ‘Young Turks’. They approach the issue of the common IE heritage, or ‘original’ phenomena from different angle: phonology, lexicon, grammar, religion, homeland, social system, etc., and the tone of some papers is clear cut – cutting the ‘old theories’ into pieces. If we read the book chapter by chapter, at the end there would remain no constructions but only ruins. What does the book then offer to the reader, after such devastating criticisms of the traditional theory, even when the existence of the IE classification itself or even the existence of the IE family is not called into question? Here I have two suggestions. A) Instead of an ‘IE heritage’ theory we might think of a triple stratification: pre IE-stratum, then IE stratum, then separate IE languages; it is not a revolutionary new theory at all. B) Instead of an old proto-language, IE was just a lingua franca for groups of peoples speaking already different languages. For the ‘classical’ IE linguistics this is a blasphemy. But we are only shifting the problem from the ‘second floor’ onto the ‘first floor’ (no mention yet of the ‘ground floor’). _____________________________________________________________________________________ © Copyright Mikes International 2001-2009 38
October-December 2009 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume I., Issue 4. _____________________________________________________________________________________ 3. I think the merit of the book is not that of re-proposing the (A) and (B) postulates mentioned above. I find more productive the way the contributing Authors touch upon the problem of sound laws in languages. Classical IE linguists fell in love with fine constructed system of regularities in every corner of the room of language: in phonology, phrases, grammar, even eco-linguistics. They have not been kin to observe irregularities, neither have they easily accepted surprising facts. However, there are thousands of irregular and surprising facts in languages and language change. The Roman Empire knew the river Danube very well, but people used two different names: Danubius and Ister. Why? The Hungarians, not a seafarer people at all, have an old word to indicate the ‘sea’: tenger. According to reliable linguists, this is a loan from an Old Turkic (Chuvash type) language, originally referring perhaps to the Black Sea. Another common Hungarian word is oroszlán ‘lion’, another loan from an Old Turkic language (not of a Chuvash type). Lions were not frequent among the Hungarians, and even the Turkic peoples were not clear about what kind of animal this term was supposed to indicate. In Old Turkic the adjective arsïl means simply: ‘yellow-like-red’. Thus, the Hungarians have a word for ‘sea’ and ‘lion’, but the word for ‘sea-lion’ is not tenger/i/ oroszlán, but simply rozmár, from the learned Medieval Latin rosmarus , which is on turn a Latinized form of Old Norse rosm-hvalr, something like ‘red whale’ (another ‘red’ animal in Hungarian). I can add that ‘seal’ in Hungarian is fóka (from the Latin phoca, which is a loan from Old Greek). Thus, languages are mosaics: it is not easy to draw regularities out of them, but it is not easy either to deconstruct the regularities present in them. Furthermore, all languages are of a more or less monolithic character, in the sense that they may resist the many attempts to trace back the regularities of their past development. For example, the history or prehistory of Japanese is an enigma, but the Japanese language exists and fulfils well the tasks of communication. IE linguistics for at least the last two hundred years has been the ‘flagship’ of all comparative linguistics. If modern linguistics is questioning the basic principles of IE studies, it is attacking also comparative linguistics altogether. If there is no IE, there is no Finno-Ugric, Altaic, Eskimo-Aleut, Na- Dene etc., and the supposed ‘reconstructions’ or ‘regularities’ of all these language groups, with the exception of IE, are even less feasible, because of the lack of their respective historical records. I know that in recent times similar, extremely critical positions against traditional comparative linguistics occur from around the world, but I am not afraid of these disruptive waves in the linguistic ocean. All scholarly formulated doubts lead to new constructions. The IE flagship of comparative linguistics fluctat, nec mergitur. IE linguistics is not the only field of historical linguistics challenged today. If somebody expresses criticism about the ‘golden lore’ of the Semitic or Basque languages, some colleagues feel they have been hurt personally. As if by criticizing any family tree model, their personal ‘credibility’ were questioned. If we look into many of the recent linguistic publications, very often old and new theorems have been sharply criticized and basically refuted. E.g. Jan W. F. Mulder and Paul Rastal (Ontological Questions in Linguistics (2005) or The Power of Speech (2006)) offer rigorous criticism about much cherished principles of language theory. Closer to our topic, Probal Dasgupta, Rajendra Sing and Alan J. Ford (After Etymology: Towards a Substantivist Linguistics (2000)) take ‘a serious look’ not only at etymology, but also at morphology, non-Paninian phonology etc. It seems to me today that not only historical and comparative IE linguistics, but also very different linguistic schools and methods face serious challenges. I find this situation excellent, and I hope it will continue. But all that does not threaten the methods of linguistics: they fluctuant, nec merguntur. _____________________________________________________________________________________ © Copyright Mikes International 2001-2009 39
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