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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: German and Germanic (was: Re: Development of Slavic Languages?
In-Reply-To: you@somehost.somedomain's message of 28 Jun 1995 12:04:23 GMT
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In article <3srgg7$mse@majestix.uni-muenster.de> you@somehost.somedomain
(K Thier) writes:

>Indogermanisch for Indo-european is a relic. It originally meant "group of
>languages including Indian (Eastern extreme then) and Germanic (West)"

>Celtic & Tokharian weren't known then.

Half-credit.  Tokharian was unknown, but Celtic was recognized as Indo-European
even by Sir Wm. Jones in his 1786 address before the Asiatick Society of Bengal
(in which he made his famous observation regarding the relatedness of Greek,
Latin, and Sanskrit).

The usual justification for "indogermanisch" was that the westermost language
of the family before modern times was Icelandic (Germanic) rather than Irish
(Celtic).
-- 
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_
