Etymology and History: For a Study of ‘Medical Language’ in Indo-European
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Abstract ‘The desire to use linguistic facts to reconstruct prehistoric events is old’ (Morpurgo Davies 1998: 174). And it persists. In her vivid and thought-provoking history of nineteenth-century linguistics Anna Davies shows how attitudes to language-based history-writing, or ‘linguistic palaeontology’, changed significantly from the confidence of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, so as to yield in the last part of the nineteenth century a much more cautious approach to the notion of reconstructing Indo-European culture on the basis of reconstructed lexical items. It is tempting to see something of a mirror image of this nineteenth-century trend at the end of the twentieth century.
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Abstract ‘The desire to use linguistic facts to reconstruct prehistoric events is old’ (Morpurgo Davies 1998: 174). And it persists. In her vivid and thought-provoking history of nineteenth-century linguistics Anna Davies shows how attitudes to language-based history-writing, or ‘linguistic palaeontology’, changed significantly from the confidence of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, so as to yield in the last part of the nineteenth century a much more cautious approach to the notion of reconstructing Indo-European culture on the basis of reconstructed lexical items. It is tempting to see something of a mirror image of this nineteenth-century trend at the end of the twentieth century.
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