Winfred Philipp Lehmann (1916–2007)

As the title says, this is an introduction to the subject of historical linguistics, the discipline that took off when European scholars and administrators like Willam Jones (Chief Judge in Calcutta) observed the similarities and parallels between Sanskrit and its descendats in India wih the classical languages like Greek and Latin, as well as contemporary languages of Europe. In course of time the whole gamut of languages oNorth India, Asia and Europe were classifies into different families and sub-families, with the implication that they all branched out from some parent language or bunch of dialects. The initial chapters, which talk of such relationships, are quite appealng, but the going gets a little tougher as the author gets into the details of sound change, grammar change, and so on, taking the European languages as examples. Of course this is a bit dated, although Lehmann is well known as a doyen of Indo-European comparative linguistics. I would have enjoyed it more if he had dwelt more on Indo-Iranian and its relation with Baltic and Slavic, which of course may not have been well researched at the time of this publication.… (mais)