… in the case of Indo-European it is certain that there was no such unitary language which can be reached by means of comparison. It woul be easy to … - Thomas Burrow
" "… in the case of Indo-European it is certain that there was no such unitary language which can be reached by means of comparison. It woul be easy to produce, more or less ad infinitum [,] a list of forms like Skt nabhi-, Gk omphalos 'navel', which although inherited directly from the primitive IE period, and radically related [,] are irreducible to a single original. In fact detailed comparison makes it clear that the Indo- European that we can reach by this means was already deeply split up into a series of varying dialects.
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About Thomas Burrow
Thomas Burrow (/ˈbʌroʊ/; 29 June 1909 – 8 June 1986) was an Indologist and the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford from 1944 to 1976; he was also a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford during this time. His work includes A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, The Problem of Shwa in Sanskrit and The Sanskrit Language.
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Additional quotes by Thomas Burrow
Burrow, whose The Sanskrit Language (1973) is still the authority in this field, says: "Vedic is a language which in most respects is more archaic and less altered from original Indo-European than any other member of the family" (34); he also states that root nouns, "very much in decline in the earliest recorded Indo-European languages", are preserved better in Sanskrit, and later adds, "Chiefly owing to its antiquity the Sanskrit language is more readily analysable, and its roots more easily separable from accretionary elements than… any other IE language" (123, 289).
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