Skip to content

One linguist’s Indo-European names become another’s proto-Basque, or Caucasian or anything else.

— J. P. Mallory

Another quote →

Source, in full

Mallory, J. P. and Adams, D. Q. 2006. Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. quoted in Nick Collins - How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World (2022)

More quotes by J. P. Mallory

For the present it will be better to hold all of these mutually conflicting theories in the backs of our minds and preclude no solution to the homeland problem.

If there are any lessons to be learned, it is that every model of Indo-European origins can be found to reveal serious deficiencies as we increase our scrutiny.

Will the 'real' linguist please stand up? It should be obvious that linguists have as much difficulty in establishing the chronological relationships between loanwords as any other 'historical science'" (98).

Mallory (1997)

Although [the domestic horse] has occasionally been recovered from Harappan sites, for example Surkotada and Kalibangan, no one would credit the earlier Harappan culture as exemplifying the horse-centred culture of the Vedic Aryans.

Mallory ended his overview of the “IE problem” (1973: 60) with this perceptive statement: “a solution to the problem will more than likely be as dependent on a re-examination of the methodology and terminology involved as much as on the actual data themselves.”

All J. P. Mallory quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: J. P. Mallory (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.