Welcome to my blog! (The birth of comparitive linguistics)
I have just created this blog, mainly for the purpose of writing about anything related to languages. Lately out of nowhere I'd get linguistic brainfarts I immediately had to share with the people around me. This tended to annoy my friends, since their interests are often going in a completely different direction. Now I thought, wouldn't it be fantastic to be able to share my thoughts on languages with people who do care? I figured the answer was yes, and thus tis blog was born.
Who I am and where I'm from is not very important, so I shall not go into detail about this.
For my first entry I'd like to post about a funny fact I heard a while ago about the birth of Comparitive Linguistics.
Comparitive Linguistics are a rather young branch of linguistics. This does not mean people hadn't tried to compare languages before, or try to find it's common roots. Even in the times of the Romans, the Romans and Greeks were convinced their languages were related in some way. But due to an apparent lack of interest the comparitive linguistics in the classical age never developed very far.
The biggest barrier for comparitive linguistics (and many scientific theories, like Evolution) was in fact Christianity. How did this influence the research?
The biblical story of the 'Tower of Babel' (Genesis 11:1-9 ) was the one that caused all this. According to this story, everybody used to speak Hebrew, the God's language. After the people tried to build a tower to the heavens, God introduced languages so people would no longer understand eachother and thus make them unable to finish the tower.
Due to this story, people were lead to believe that all language were in some way related to the Hebrew language. It must be clear that research that tried to compare Latin to Hebrew wasn't a very fruitful one. And thus for a long time people were unable to define the actual bonds and history of the languages.
Only much later, when people started taking the bible a bit less litterarely, people learnt to look at bonds between languages which were related, Like Latin, Sanskrit and Persian. And thus Comparitive linguistics was born.
I can not assure you that all my posts will be as informative or as linguistically easy as this one, but I will try to include these interesting facts every now and then.
--PhoeniX
Who I am and where I'm from is not very important, so I shall not go into detail about this.
For my first entry I'd like to post about a funny fact I heard a while ago about the birth of Comparitive Linguistics.
Comparitive Linguistics are a rather young branch of linguistics. This does not mean people hadn't tried to compare languages before, or try to find it's common roots. Even in the times of the Romans, the Romans and Greeks were convinced their languages were related in some way. But due to an apparent lack of interest the comparitive linguistics in the classical age never developed very far.
The biggest barrier for comparitive linguistics (and many scientific theories, like Evolution) was in fact Christianity. How did this influence the research?
The biblical story of the 'Tower of Babel' (Genesis 11:1-9 ) was the one that caused all this. According to this story, everybody used to speak Hebrew, the God's language. After the people tried to build a tower to the heavens, God introduced languages so people would no longer understand eachother and thus make them unable to finish the tower.
Due to this story, people were lead to believe that all language were in some way related to the Hebrew language. It must be clear that research that tried to compare Latin to Hebrew wasn't a very fruitful one. And thus for a long time people were unable to define the actual bonds and history of the languages.
Only much later, when people started taking the bible a bit less litterarely, people learnt to look at bonds between languages which were related, Like Latin, Sanskrit and Persian. And thus Comparitive linguistics was born.
I can not assure you that all my posts will be as informative or as linguistically easy as this one, but I will try to include these interesting facts every now and then.
--PhoeniX
posted by PhoeniX at 12:59 PM
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