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Article: 'Indo-European' designates languages: not pots and not institutions.
- Article from:
- Antiquity
- Article date:
- September 1, 2005
- Author:
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Kristian Kristiansen, cogent critic though he may be, commits a category error of a depressingly familiar kind. It is a confusion which has led distinguished scholars such as Dumezil into error, and which, by allowing the conflation of such categories as language, ethnicity, race and institution, worked to the detriment of many groups and nations during the twentieth century, and now, no doubt, also in the twenty-first.
Nowhere does he define precisely what he imagines the term 'indo-European' to mean. Following the perspective agreed by most historical linguists I take it to be a linguistic term, pertaining therefore to languages, members of the language family ...