Talk:Comparative method: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:12, 16 April 2011

Revision as of 16:15, 16 April 2011

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:I have restored the status quo ante. What is unique about Jones is his positing of some no-longer existent independent source, Blench's unsourced cavils notwithstanding. Ibn Quraysh does not posit the origin of Hebrew and Arabic in some common and no longer spoken proto-tongue, but attributes Hebrew to the Patriarchs with other's being Arabicized away from God's original Hebrew. The same naive pre-scientific mythological view holds for the Romans. They believed their tongue was a debased form of Greek, not that it and Greek both evolved from some distinct third (proto-) language no longer spoken. [[User:Medeis|μηδείς]] ([[User talk:Medeis|talk]]) 02:59, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

What? Blench's criticism is not at all "unsupported" or "vague". By all means, take a look at Jones' remarks in the Third SpeechAddress to the Asiatick Society and you will see that the criticism is mostly accurate. For example, Jones explicitly says that Hindustani belongs to a different stock than Sanskrit (unlike Latin, Greek and Persian), and is only influenced by it.

Also, he clearly fails to differentiate between the history of "races" (i.e., ethnic groups) and languages (and even between the history of spoken language and scripts), and often conflates his bizarre speculations about the origins of "races" (i.e. that modern Indians are related to Egyptians, Chinese and even "Peruvians") with his linguistic speculation.