From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 61169
Date: 2008-11-01
----- Original Message -----
From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
Like everything else, there should be some tangible benefit at the end
of the road, before you choose to take it. To Rasmus Rask, there was
the everyday puzzle of why two such similar languages as Danish and
Swedish should exist, without one being more 'right' than the other.
To the Grimm brothers, the puzzle was why Low German which was so
similar to Dutch should be a German dialect while Dutch wasn't (why is
it not part of Germany?). To William Jones, the striking similarity
between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin offered an opportunity to see the
English as distant cousins of the Indian upper class, with just as
much claim as that to interfere in Indian matters.
Torsten
=======
By the way,
Do you know where Rask wrote that :
"Si l'on trouve entre deux langues que la forme des mots indispensables
s'accorde à un tel point qu'on peut découvrir les règles des changements de
lettres permettant de passer de l'une à l'autre, alors il existe une parenté
fondamentale entre ces langues."
I guess it might be in his book about Islandic
but the problem is I cannot translate it back into Danish and find the right
reference !
Thank you for your help.
Arnaud