Landsberg Marge E. Materials for a Bibliography of Translinguistic Studies

Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1986. — 79 p.One of the earliest examples of the science of comparative philology was provided by the British orientalist and jurist. Sir William Jones (1746-1794), who 'founded the (later Royal) Asiatic Society of Bengal' in 1784, in order ‘to encourage oriental studies' (Haywood 1971, 13:74). In discussing the life and work of Sir William Jones, Haywood (1971, 13:75) points out that it was during the latter half of that century 'In his 1786 presidential discourse to the Asiatic Society [that] he postulated the common ancestry of Sanskrit and Greek,' which proved to herald the beginning of a new era for comparative philology. It was also during the latter half of that century that the concept and term 'Indo-European' were generated. As observed by Joshua Whatmough (1971, 12:169), the term 'is applied to a number of languages found, in the old world, chiefly in India or Europe (hence the name). The term appears to have been invented by the physician and physicist Thomas Young (1773-1829).
In Germany the corresponding term is "Indo-Germanic."' Whatmough (1971, 12:169) points out that 'The Indo-European languages possess in common certain phonematic, morphomatic, syntactic and verbal (i.e., vocabulary) features which, no matter how changed in the course of time, can be explained only on the assumption that they are descended from a common source, of which we have no direct record; i.e., "by inheritance" and not by borrowing.' As Whatmough (1971, 12:169) observes, 'there is a great mass of evidence...not only in vocabulary but also in grammar, the interpretation of which is quite unequivocal; namely that there existed in the 3rd millennium B.C. a language, or, according to some a group of related dialects, to which the name Indo-European is conventionally applied. Its much older source is conjectured to have been in the ancient Mediterranean basin (where it may have had links with Hamitic and Semitic and perhaps Caucasian languages).
It is to be wondered at that such a highly controversial statement appears here as general information, for even today very few scholars can be found who would underwrite the theory of such 'links.' Indeed, courses in historical linguistics at universities all over the world, in spite of much perplexing evidence to the contrary, mostly still persist in adhering to strict Indo-European theories.
Yet it cannot be denied that there have always been dissenting voices, and for the better part of a century there have appeared in the comparative linguistic literature, works by scholars already well- established in the academic world by their previous scientific endeavours, who at one time or another in their lives appear to have succumbed to a sudden urge to endanger their immaculate academic reputation by indulging in what I shall term here 'translinguistic' investigations, involving 'disparate' linguistic stocks.