Book review200 Jahre Indogermanistik. Monographisch-historiographischer Teil. Bibliographischer Teil. . Salzburg & Wien: Edition Tandem, 20162018. .viii, 124 pp. ISBN 978-3-902932-50-1 €37vi, 110 pp. / 978-3-902932-61-7 €37
Table of contents
The book under review is dedicated to a significant event: the 200th anniversary of Indo-European linguistics (thus according to the book title), or, more precisely, to one of the milestones of the history of Indo-European studies: the publication of the seminal monograph Über das Conjugationssystem (1816) by Franz Bopp (1791–1867), one of the founders of Indo-European linguistics. This is of course not the only event that might be considered a possible starting point of Indo-European scholarship; thus, alternatively, it may be (and often is) associated with Sir William Jones’ (1746–1794) famous lecture to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1786, where he pointed out the striking similarity of several “Classical” Indo-European languages, including Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, assuming the existence of a common source. And of course even earlier predecessors of these pioneers of Indo-European studies can be found in the preceding centuries. Yet, there are good reasons to consider the publication of Bopp’s Conjugationssystem the starting point (“Geburtstag der Indogermanistik”, in the author’s own words, p. v) of a systematic research and accumulation of knowledge that rapidly became the basis of one of the most impressive edifices within the language sciences, viz. Indo-European linguistics. The author of the book, Thomas Lindner (TL), an extraordinary Professor of historical-comparative linguistics at the University of Salzburg and corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, has made a valuable contribution to the study of the history of ideas in the first decades of the existence of this branch of the languages studies, when Indo-European linguistics was still in its infancy. TL offers a very useful and interesting overview of this early period of the development, also paying attention to the predecessors of Indo-European studies, up to as early as the middle of the 16th century. In a sense, the title of the book is somewhat misleading, since it neither claims to cover all 200 years of Indo-European scholarship, from 1816 onwards, nor focuses on Bopp’s 1816 monograph alone. A more accurate title might be (or at least include, as a subtitle) “Early decades and predecessors of Indo-European studies” or the like.
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