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Deconstructing Grimm's laws reveals the unrecognized foot and leg symbolism in Indo-European lexicons
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Stephen R. Berlant
Published/Copyright:
September 1, 2008
Abstract
This article begins by briefly examining the history of the comparative method underpinning historical linguistics. It then goes on to show how and why the laws grounding this method were formulated in egregiously unscientific ways, and why adhering to those laws has prevented scholars in many disciplines from recognizing the botanically related foot, leg, and other metaphors that existed in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) ancestor of Indo-European (IE) languages. Finally, the paper shows how the PIE lexicon can be reconstructed far more logically and parsimoniously by ignoring these alleged laws and using figurative associations to cognate the many words this lexicon yielded.
Keywords:: historical linguistics
Published Online: 2008-09-01
Published in Print: 2008-August
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Keywords for this article
historical linguistics
Articles in the same Issue
- Looking behind the symbol: Mythic algebra, numbers, and the illusion of linear sequence
- Role conflict as an interactional resource in the multimodal emergence of expert identity
- Symbols in dialogical structure of semiotics
- The interpretation of verbo-pictorial images in billboards and store banners in Jordanian society: An experimental study
- Identity, freedom, and answerability in the global world: A semiotic approach
- Signification and alterity in Emmanuel Lévinas
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- A view on denotation in photography
- Xenology as phenomenological semiotics
- Fashion as communication: A semiotic analysis of fashion on ‘Sex and the City’
- Memes versus signs: On the use of meaning concepts about nature and culture
- Media literacy and semiotics: Toward a future taxonomy of meaning
- Multiscale textual semiotic analysis
- Deconstructing Grimm's laws reveals the unrecognized foot and leg symbolism in Indo-European lexicons
- A semiotic approach to the pathology of literary Décadence
- Complex systems in Renaissance and Postmodern texts: Aesthetic and epistemological consequences
- ‘To give an imagination to the listeners’: The neglected poetics of Navajo ideophony
- Hjelmslev's semiotic model of language: An exegesis
- Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the land of the Cartesians: From comparative reception to cultural comparison
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