Indo-Germanic

[Anshuman Pandey]

On Mon, 3 Mar 1997, Fco. Javier Martnez Garca wrote:

> > >Cf. F.R. Shapiro, (1981): +On the origin of the term `Indo-germanic'; 
> > >Historiographia Linguistica 8, p. 165-170.
> 
> > Does he say (by the way) who's the first one who used "Indoeuropean"?
> 
> No, he doesn't. But that's also a very interesting question.

I once read that Marcus Z. Boxhorn, a Dutch scholar, was the first to
postulate a theory of common origin of the Indo-European languages.
Although Boxhorn did not publish his work on the matter, his friend,
George Horn made his ideas known in Europe during the late seventeenth
century. Even though Boxhorn distinguished IE from Semitic and
Finno-Ugrian, he failed to add Persian and other Iranian languages to
this Indo-European group. Was Boxhorn the one to coin this "Indo-European"
term?

It seems that it wasn't until 1783 when Sir William Jones noticed
remarkable similarities between Persian and Sanskrit, and then between
Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek, that further in-depth studies were done on the
commonality of these languages. I don't think that Jones was the one to
coin IE.

I wish I could provide some references to these statements, but the above
is all I could dig out of my memory.

Regards,
Anshuman Pandey
apandey at u.washington.edu