Talk:Karl Brugmann
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[edit] Most authoritative?
Beginning in 1897, Brugmann began publishing a revision and expansion of his portion of the "Grundriss". The resulting second edition, concluded in 1916, still constitutes the single most authoritative work on Indo-European linguistics.
No way. Even it was excellent in the times in which Brugmann wrote it, the 'Grundriss' is obviously completely outdated today. It is not Brugmann's fault, actually; he had no idea about Hittite, Tocharian, Mycenaean Greek etc. because the languages were not known yet. He did not know the notion of a 'phoneme'. He did not know about the laryngeals, accent shifts in Greek, and thousands of other things that have been discovered / worked out since then. The 'Grundriss' is a valuable work as far as the history of IE linguistics is concerned, and - as noted by Beekes in his 'Introduction...', p. 292 - 'it is almost always rewarding to study the great scholars of the past, like (...) Brugmann (...)', but it does not mean that the 'Grundriss' is still a valid handbook today. Far from that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.89.178.233 (talk) 00:03, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
