Undeception

Earlier I made mention of the consistency of sound changes, what the nineteenth-century German grammarians called the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze (the “exceptionlessness of sound change”) . The catalyst for this belief, which was in turn the catalyst for the existence of the discipline of historical linguistics, was the product of the work of two men, [...]

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My last post dealt with the anthropological side of my discipline. Most of what we know about the history of the Indo-European people groups comes not from historical records per se, but from analysis and comparison of the languages in which those historical records were composed. Philology (”love of words”) is an old term used [...]

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Germanic and Indo-European studies. What the heck is that? Well, let me start with a summary of the anthropological side of the discipline.
Once upon a time, in an area hypothesized to be along the steppes of Russia, on the north side of the Black Sea, lived a people called the Indo-Europeans. They spoke a language [...]

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