Balto-Slavic: what Meillet was Thinking, or, what was Meillet Thinking?!
Balto-Slavic: what Meillet was Thinking, or, what was Meillet Thinking?!
Author(s): Joseph Brian D.Subject(s): Language studies, Geography, Regional studies, Recent History (1900 till today), Historical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Baltic Languages, Pre-WW I & WW I (1900 -1919), Interwar Period (1920 - 1939), Identity of Collectives
Published by: Lietuvių Kalbos Institutas
Keywords: Antoine Meillet; Balto-Slavic; dialect; history of linguistics; Indo-European; Italo-Celtic; language and nation;
Summary/Abstract: Antoine Meillet was as serious an Indo-Europeanist as there ever was, and yet not everything he wrote is uncontroversial. His take on Balto-Slavic, from Les dialectes indo-européens (1908, 2nd edn. 1922), is one such case – see Szemerényi 1957 – and specifically Meillet’s claim that there is no compelling evidence for a Balto-Slavic subgroup within Indo-European. I explore here just what Meillet meant by “‘dialect’ of Indo-European” in relation to Balto-Slavic, e.g. what gave rise to the 10 (or so) branches (branches as “dialects”) within the Indo-European family, or dialect variation within Proto-Indo-European itself. Further, in the 1922 “avant-prôpos”, Meillet refers to the Indo-European unity as “national” in nature, raising the question of the relevance of Meillet’s sense of the relationship between language and nation (Moret 2013) to the issue of a possible Balto-Slavic unity.
Journal: Acta Linguistica Lithuanica
- Issue Year: 2017
- Issue No: 76
- Page Range: 40-50
- Page Count: 11
- Language: English
