Folia Uralica Debreceniensia 17. - Finnugor Nyelvtudományi Tanszék

ISMERTETÉSEK – REZENSIONEN – REVIEWS – KATSAUKSIA – РЕЦЕНЗИИguistics. Gimbutas, Renfrew and the less known experts do not “speak” thesame epistemological vocabulary.It is interesting to follow, how rapidly or how slowly new results spread.And how long theories, which have lost their arguments so many years ago,survive. See e.g. two up-to-date publications about related topics: Early Contactsbetween Uralic and Indo-European Linguistic and Archaeological Considerations.Papers presented at an international symposium held at theTvärminne Research Station of the University of Helsinki 8-10 January,1999. Edited by Christian Carpelan, Asko Parpola and Petteri Koskikallio.Helsinki, 2001. Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura – Haarmann, Harald and JoanMarler : Introducing the Mythological Crescent. Ancient Beliefs and Imageryconnecting Eurasia with Anatolia. Wiesbaden, 2008. Harrasowitz. Both ofthe publications show the need of constant reinterpretation of the once“successful” IE theories.Being a down-to-soil empiricist, I find the situation not at all frightening.The question marks, the experts challenging the views of their colleagues –are signs of IE studies being active. As for the “historical” or better to say“protohistorical” new archaeology (since the revolutionary new paradigm bySir Colin Renfrew) the trouble is that instead of 2-3 thousand years of the IEpast, today we might look back into 5 or more thousand years. And, if thewritten documents could not be dated back with thousands of years – wehave only to speculate about traditions by hundreds-of-generations, and of“la langue durée”, and “oral” traditions, without text documents – in spite ofthe today so prolific theory of “Cultural memory” by Jan Assmann. In 19 thcentury, at the most optimistic phase of IE linguistics, excellent scholarswere working on reconstruction of not only words and syntactic patterns ofthe IE, but accents and phrases, etc. I still hope, it is in principle not an impossibletask – but I do not think the available historical documents permitsuch a reliable reconstruction today. And here a major evident trouble isemerging. 19 th century linguistics was generalizing and evolutionary. Todaywe are more sceptical. The scholars had a strict system of sounds, wordclasses and grammatical rules in their mind. Any derivational model oflanguages (especially the “family tree”) was preferred. Today the opposite istrue. Marcantonio’s Leitmotiv is to challenge those simple “regularities”. Butafter all scepticism languages develop not only by caprice. Languages followpatterns, regularities and even laws. It is not easy to explain, why theHungarian (not at all an IE language!) is using a “Satem” word: száz for‘100’. But it is a fact, and the Finnish word sata ‘100’ from the samebackground makes the explanation more complicated. We can have several204