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From: alderson@netcom21.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Greenberg and Chong [was: Re: Sun Language Theory?
In-Reply-To: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu's message of Tue, 14 Jan 1997 18:52:55 GMT
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Date: Fri, 17 Jan 1997 01:29:55 GMT
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In article <E40Hs7.226@midway.uchicago.edu> deb5@midway.uchicago.edu
(Daniel von Brighoff) writes:

>What's so different about this approach?  The very birth of comparative
>reconstruction stems from a multilateral comparison (Greek-Latin-Sanskrit).
>William Jones was intuitive, perhaps to the point of sloppiness, but his work
>has weathered fairly well, doncha think?

According to Garland Cannon's _The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones_, Sir Wm.
was a very meticulous worker (comes of being an attorney-at-law as well as a
poet and translator, I would guess), who very likely laid out large numbers of
correspondences for himself before coming to his famous conclusion.  Neither
"intuitive" nor "sloppy," nicht wahr?
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
