Introduction
‘Indo-European’ is primarily a term of historical linguistics. It refers to the
great family of languages that now extends across every continent and already
two thousand years ago extended across the whole breadth of Europe and
large tracts of central and southern Asia; or it refers to the hypothetical
ancestral language from which all the recorded Indo-European languages
descend.
That affinities existed among various of these languages, including
Persian and Sanskrit, was often observed from the sixteenth century on. In
the seventeenth, the idea emerged of an extinct parent language, generally
identified as ‘Scythian’ or ‘Japhetic’, as the source of the historical tongues.^1
The scientific study of linguistic relationships began early in the nineteenth
century, pioneered by scholars with monosyllabic names such as Rask, Bopp,
Grimm, and Pott. It was at this time that the terms ‘Indo-Germanic’ and
‘Indo-European’ were coined; they are first recorded in 1810 and 1813
respectively.^2 The two centuries since then have seen steady advances in
knowledge and understanding, and the progress achieved is now cumu-
latively enormous. All serious students operate on the assumption of a
single parent language as the historical source of all the known Indo-
European languages.
This is still a hypothesis, not an observable fact, but it is an inescapable
hypothesis. Of course, when this proto-Indo-European was spoken, it was
itself only one of many languages that existed at that time, and it was no
doubt related to some of the others. Some scholars argue for affinities with
(^1) For the early comparatists see the survey of Sergent (1995), 21–7, who cites an ample
bibliography.
(^2) See K. Koerner, IF 86 (1981), 1–29. ‘Indo-Germanic’ was meant to define the family by
reference to its eastern and western extremities; that Celtic belongs in it was not discovered till
the 1830s. ‘Indogermanisch’ continues to be the prevalent term among German-speakers, for
whom it has the merit of greater euphony as well as appealing to national feeling, but in the rest
of the learned world the more inclusive ‘Indo-European’ is now standard.