Wendy Doniger writes:
Martin West, who has written what is surely the definitive book on Indo-European language and religion, states his case well: ‘The assumption of a single parent language as the historical source of all the known Indo-European languages . . . is still a hypothesis, not an observable fact, but it is an inescapable hypothesis.’ The Indo-European map links languages together in a group that is distinct from other groups, such as those that include Chinese or Tamil, say. The evidence that the Indo-European languages are related lies primarily in their grammar and vocabulary. Thus ‘foot’ is pada in Sanskrit, pes, pedis in Latin, pied in French, fuss in German, foot in English and so forth, and nouns and verbs behave entirely differently from their Hebrew or Navajo counterparts.

(LRB 10 April 2008)

Oxford | hardback 525 pp. |ISBN: 9780199280759