Dwight Goldwinde

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The sheer richness of Sanskrit also went against the Enlightenment belief that languages had begun in poverty and gradually grown more elaborate.76 This brought about a growing realisation that Vico had been right, and that the structure of languages could reveal a great deal about the antiquity of man. In turn, this launched the great age of philology, as it was then called, in the nineteenth century, as grammar was studied as well as vocabulary, to reveal groups of languages–for example, the separation of the Germanic languages from Greek, Latin and Balto Slavic.77 Here the work of Schlegel ...more
Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud
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