Throughout centuries of linguistic research, the Indo-European language family has been the paragon for historical and comparative linguistics. Indo-European linguistics has set the golden standard for the field—from the family tree model to the strict division between synchrony and diachrony. Any educated student of historical linguistics will be trained on the laws of Indo-European (explicitly summarised by N.E. Collinge in his 1985 compendium). Similar developments will then be discovered in the comparative studies for many other families, reaching into the previously undescribed languages of South America, Australia, and New Guinea, and giving them an extra glow of respectability. Studies of Indo-European languages have, in many senses, been laying down the law of the land for historical linguistics, hand-in-hand with painstaking philological studies of older sources of languages whose documentation goes back thousands of years—Hittite, Luvian, Ancient Greek, to name a few. New models of historical expansion and reconstruction of origins and ancestral homelands use the Indo-European family as a testing ground (for better or for worse, and oftentimes with dubious results). As the discipline of linguistics evolves and expands over time, so do studies of Indo-European languages.
Calvert Watkins, a classic of the field, remarked in 2001: ‘far less familiar than the value of Indo-European for the traditional comparative method is the value of Indo-European as a laboratory for language contact and areal studies’. Now, more than twenty years on, this is no longer so. Indo-European linguistics—and more precisely, the study of Ancient Indo-European languages which have survived only in written sources—has progressed to embrace language contact, areal diffusion, and sociolinguistic variation. This volume is a testimony to this true progress in linguistics.
Back in the old days, language contact studies may have been considered a hand-maid of historical reconstruction. Chapters in this volume show, inter alia, how painstaking investigations of contact-induced change and the smatterings of sociolinguistic variation—gleaned from the ancient tablets and lore—can help improve and refine our reconstruction and fine-tune our knowledge of the proto-language. Using the metaphor by Brian Joseph (in this volume), the echoes of Indo-European heritage reverberate across semantic patterns in the daughter languages and those which come in contact with them. The Proto-Indo-European concept of ‘long life’ is a case in point.
As the discipline of linguistics evolves and we learn more and more about how languages work and what to look for, new phenomena come to light. We now know that many Ancient Indo-European languages, Hittite among them, had serial verbs, a phenomenon first identified for West African languages back in the later nineteenth century. A careful reconstruction of sociolinguistic situations—gleaned from the attested documents—sheds new light on the diffusion of grammatical categories and the emergence of typologically uncommon patterns. The periphrastic perfect in Classical Armenian was developed under the influence of Parthian, an Iranian language (in Meyer’s chapter in this volume). The uncommon feature of this newly developed perfect was, for a period of time, ‘tripartite marking’—with A (transitive subject), O (transitive object), and S (intransitive subject), each expressed in a distinct way—comes from the reanalysis of the Parthian ergative structure. The Old Persian indefinite pronouns bear an indelible impact of the contemporary Elamite, a neighbouring isolate (Briceño-Villalobos, this volume). Elamite must have been learnt as a second language of administration by Iranian-speaking scribes. The development of indefinite meanings in interrogative pronouns is hardly unusual. It is the context of this contact-induced change in the ancient world that makes it curious.
New ways of looking at ancient languages—in comparison with modern language situations—yield new results. We now know that Greek spoken from 1st century CE onward in Egypt bears a strong impact of Coptic, and appears to have all the trimmings of a contact language, not dissimilar to Finland Swedish, or Indian English (as shown in Dahlgren’s chapter). And what was taken for granted no longer has to be. A passage of the Iliad that had been unquestionably taken to be of Near-Eastern origin, can in fact be traced back to Indo-European patterns of Anatolia (as shown by Bianconi). Different registers of a language—or, as Shields puts it, each ‘situationally-defined variety’—would have their special, linguistic features. Differences in syntactic techniques employed in Ancient Greek legal inscriptions and in the Hittite Laws (many of which bear a strong impact of contemporary Akkadian laws) highlight their different functions in the two societies, and the differences in language material at hand, evolved over centuries. Many conclusions are tentative, and so they have to be: acknowledging the limits of what one knows is a mark of true scholarship.
For centuries, studies of Indo-European languages have led the way, in linguistics and philology. To be an Indo-Europeanist, one needs to be a polymath: the knowledge of languages, sources, history, often epigraphy, and many other associated disciplines are de rigueur. No place for short-lived rules and formal theories—none of which will ever outlive the languages they purportedly apply to. This volume is a compendium of polymaths, with each chapter a gem, and an impressive repository of knowledge and analytic depth. Studies like this one will lead the way to further glory for Indo-European scholarship. Here is to its long life—in the words of the title of Brian Joseph’s chapter! Or—using an Albanian expression with a long Proto-Indo-European pedigree—për (në) jetë të jetëve ‘for eternity’, literally, ‘for (a) lifetime of lifetimes’!
References
Collinge, Neville E. 1985, The laws of Indo-European, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Watkins, Calvert 2001, An Indo-European linguistic area and its characteristics: Ancient Anatolia. Areal diffusion as a challenge to the comparative method?, in A.Y. Aikhenvald—R.M.W. Dixon (eds.), Areal diffusion and genetic inheritance. Problems in comparative linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 44–63.