Levin Saul. The Indo-European and Semitic Languages

State University of New York Press, 1971. — 818 p.Comparisons between the Indo-European languages and other language-groups have gained little acceptance. Most linguists have found few, if any, solid results from such comparisons and no longer consider the effort worthwhile. The greater part of the effort has gone into comparing the Indo-European (hereafter IE) and the Semitic groups. As I claim to have found much that my predecessors overlooked, I ought to say why, in my opinion, they had such poor success: their methods of investigating the structure of Semitic languages were too inflexible, too much dominated by some unchanging axioms. This is a sober, not a sneering judgement upon the backwardness of the Semitists. They have labored under much greater disadvantages than the Indo- Europeanists. In number they have been fewer; their vernaculars are of course IE, not Semitic; and an Occidental education, so long as it included the intensive study of Latin and Greek for many years of childhood and adolescence, was an excellent start for a budding IE linguist, but it did much less to encourage Semitics. Such interest as the Occident has had in the Semitic languages must further be discounted somewhat, insofar as it sprang from the theological motive of understanding the content of the Old Testament, to which the study of Hebrew and the related Semitic languages was ancillary, rather than desirable for its own sake.