SV: SV: Sanskrit translations in Nazi hands

Paul Kekai Manansala kekai at JPS.NET
Wed Jan 13 00:55:46 UTC 1999


Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
>
> Paul Kekai Manansala <kekai at JPS.NET> wrote:
>
> >Even Sir William Jones was sketchy about the
> >relationship of Sanskrit to other Indian languages.  He denied that
> >Hindi was in any way related to Sanskrit, but otoh believed that most
> >of what is now known as Austronesian was related to the modern
> >Indo-European family.
>
> Interesting.  I'm not familiar at all with Sir William Jones'
> thoughts on linguistics, except for the famous paragraph in which he
> is said to have first identified the Indo-European language family.
> I do know that a rather well-known Indo-Europeanist from around the
> turn of the century (whose name escapes me right now) did indeed
> propose a relationship between Indo-European and Austronesian
> (Malayo-Polynesian).  It would be interesting to know if he had been
> in any way influenced by Jones in this.  What is your source for
> Jones' thoughts on IE and MP?

I think that Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote something on this recently,
referring to (I believe) the following source:

Callaghan, Catherine A. & Wick R. Miller (1962)``Swadesh's Macro
Mixtecan hypothesis and English,'' Southwestern Journal of Anthropology
18.278-285.

Btw, Callaghan and Miller attack Swadesh by using his method to show
that English is Macro-Mixtecan.

Regards,
Paul Kekai Manansala





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