IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/5/00 3:57:31 AM Mountain Standard Time,
Georg at home.ivm.de writes:

>Sorry, but that's [lexical comparison] not how the fact that there is an IE
>family of languages was discovered in the first place. The fact that there is
>an IE family of languages was discovered in the first place by looking at
>cognate verbal morphology.

-- no, sorry, that came slightly later.

In 1767, Parson's "Remains of Japhet" demonstrated the close relationship of
Irish and Welsh by comparing a list of 1000 vocabulary items and concluding
that they were "originally the same", ie., derived from a common ancestor.
(What we'd call Proto-Celtic; the terminology hadn't evolved then, of course.)

He then compared Celtic, Greek, Latin and the Romance languages, the Germanic
languages, Slavic, Indo-Aryan and Iranian -- using a list of the basic
numerals, initially, on the basis that these were relatively stable items of
vocabulary.

("Numbers being convenient to every nation, their names were most likely to
continue nearly the same, even  though other parts of languages might be
liable to change and alteration", to quote.  A perfectly reasonable
statement.)

Parsons then concluded _from this comparison of the numerals_ that all these
languages were related and descended from a common ancestor.

And the resemblance does leap out of the page at you when you put the
numerals 1-10 in those languages side-by-side.

He then listed the numerals in Turkish, Hebrew, Malay and Chinese, to show
examples of unrelated languages.

If that isn't discovering the existance of the IE group of languages, what is?

Granted Parsons is somewhat obscure, and his book unreadable and full of
assorted credulities and unsupported assertions, in this aspect he was
entirely correct.

Sir William Jones usually gets the credit for discovering IE, and he did
quote the "forms of grammar" -- verbal morphology, perhaps, although I think
he had the declension of the noun in Sanskrit and Latin in mind.

However, he also mentions the "roots of verbs"; ie., the lexical items
themselves.

Then we have Rasmus Rask, who pointed out the uniformity of sound shifts
which allowed the transformation of words in one IE language into another --
again, a reliance on -vocabulary-.

And the actual term "Indo-European" derives from a review by Thomas Young in
1813 of Adelung's "Mithridates", based on comparisons of translations of the
Lord's Prayer in a number of languages.

So the initial discovery of Indo-European was produced by straightforward
comparison of lexical items.  That made it obvious, in a straightforward
common-sense way, that the languages were related.  Grammatical analysis
followed.