Indo-Germanic

[Luis Gonzalez-Reimann]

At 10:12 PM 2/27/97 Fco. Javier Martinez Garcia wrote:

>German Indo-Europeanists do use also use the term "indoeropaeisch", but
>as far I can see it was mostly used by _East_german scholars.
>"Indoeropaeisch" sounds just like belonging to Eastern _official_
>terminology.

This is interesting.  It would seem clear that all Soviet-block countries
carefully avoided terminology that carried any possible Germanic
nationalistic connotation.  But after the unification of Germany, West
Germans apparently associate the term with bureaucratic official East German
(inferior?) terminology.

There is possibly a comparable situation in the use of BCE (before the
common era) and CE (common era), as opposed to BC and AD.  BC and CE are
(obviously) Christian terms.  So non-Christian scholars (e.g. Israeli) have
long used BCE and CE.  But BCE and CE were (are?) also preferred in the
former Soviet-block countries because they don't carry a religious
connotation.  BCE and CE seem now to increasingly be the terms of choice, at
least in English, because they do not refer to any particular religious
tradition over others.

> (Please note: as you can read, I am also not a German! :-}

I had noticed.  Desde hace tiempo.


Luis Gonzalez-Reimann