1071: Classical Influences on Modern Linguistics Nov 14, 2017

A Classical European education would typically include Latin and Greek along with one's native language, or any other modern languages available in school. This meant partly that for a few centuries once linguistics became established as an academic field, while there was a large collection of data on languages of Africa, the Americas, etc. and later Oceania, comparative linguistics was largely narrow. With a few exceptions, most likely Hungarian, this somewhat accidental cultural norm was one of the factors that led the prevalence of Indo-European as a focus of study in linguistics for those in Europe and often elsewhere. This issue was not only cultural nor racial, but also political. In 1799, Hungarian was related to Finnish (correctly), but other languages belonging to the Finno-Ugric family [2] could not be studied, as they were spoken within Russia. Some languages were unfairly included or excluded from the label (which went by many names over the years) by modern standards for political reasons as well. Now, while language-classifications are determined in a far more systematic way, and there is generally more data accessible, much of linguistic analysis is skewed towards a relatively small group of languages in part because it is often easier at any period in time to work using ideas established by others.