Language, History, Ideology: The Use and Misuse of Historical-Comparative Linguistics
Language, History, Ideology: The Use and Misuse of Historical-Comparative Linguistics
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Abstract
Since its beginnings, historical-comparative linguistics has had its “encounters” with ideology. Eighteenth-century pioneering arguments for a Finno-Ugric family met with strong resistance from Hungarian nationalists. In Indo-European studies, the problematic “beech tree” argument placed the homeland near Germanic and thus supported the “Nordic” origin of the “Aryans”; Russian nationalists see archaeological sites like Arkaim as the home of the “Aryans” and themselves as the descendants of these “Aryans”; and Indian nationalists try to locate the Indo-European homeland in India. To further political agendas, “alternative” histories have been proposed for Moldovian and Maltese, and for a language like Afrikaans an absolutely white origin was defended. Parallel to these developments and partly interacting with them, the rise of nation states, with their insistence on a single national language, led to the suppression of minority languages and dialects; conversely, the split of former Yugoslavia led to split of the former common language, Serbo-Croatian, into four languages in order to supply the successor states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia each with its own “national language.” Finally, even practicing linguists may be led astray by their biases. This volume presents twelve in-depth studies of cases where ideology has influenced historical-comparative linguistic work or has led to the rejection of comparative-historical linguistic findings, or where linguistic nationalism has affected the historical development of languages.
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Front Matter
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1
Introduction
Camiel Hamans andHans Henrich Hock
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2
Misunderstanding historical linguistics: Three Uralic examples
Johanna Laakso
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3
Ideologies and linguistic development in North Germanic
Kristján Árnason
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4
Ideology and recent attacks on historical-comparative methodology: Historical linguistics under siege?
Hans Henrich Hock
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5
Indo-European linguistic paleontology and ideology: Nice wheels!
Hans Henrich Hock
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6
Historical linguistics and the Macedonia name issue: What’s in a name?
Brian D. Joseph
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7
Celtic and English language contact and scholarly attitudes
Anders Ahlqvist
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8
Borrowing and historical-linguistic ideology
Johanna Laakso
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9
The origin of Afrikaans: Purism or language contact?
Camiel Hamans
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10
Moldovan and Maltese: The poverty of historicism in Romance linguistics
John Charles Smith
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11
Speeding up language change: Examples from the former Yugoslavia
Ranko Bugarski
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12
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages: Turning the tide against linguistic nationalism
Camiel Hamans
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13
Methodological nationalism and (anti-)historicism in the history of linguistics: Linguistic essentialism
Ferdinand von Mengden andBritta Schneider
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End Matter
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