Quoting John Cowan <[log in to unmask]>:

> Andreas Johansson scripsit:

> > BTW, I recently read a piece which suggested that Indo-European be
> renamed
> > Indo-Anatolic, on the grounds that it's basically made up of two
> branches -
>
> This "Indo-Hittite hypothesis" has been around a long time, possibly
> as
> far back as the discovery that Hittite was IE-related.  I thought it
> more
> or less died out in the 1940s, and I haven't heard of any new
> evidence.

I don't think the piece I refered to gave any evidence, new or old. I can't at
the moment recall where I read it, so I can't check either. I really should be
getting a bit more organized in this regard ...

> > What I find myself
> > wondering, however, is why the "Indo-" bit of IE was chosen for
> "Indo-
> > European" - there being rather more European than Indian branches of
> IE,
>
> We call the Indic languages a single branch by convention, but there
> are
> more (living) languages in it (296, by the Ethnologue's count) than in
> all the
> other branches put together (only 147).

Hm, according to an old Britannica entry laying around on my HD, Indic isn't
even a branch but a subbranch of Indo-Iranian ... Anyways, are there
differences between the Indic languages comparable to those between, say,
Germanic and Greek? I would put to much weight to those numbers of languages -
most of those Indic ones are only dialects of, presumeably, Hindi on the Army-
and-Navy test anyway!

> Traditionally the German name for IE was Indogermanisch, although from
> a
> purely geographical standpoint Indokeltisch would have been more like
> it.

The idea was to have the easternmost and westermost branches indicated in the
name, wasn't it? I'm then severly tempted to suggest "Slavogermanic", 'cos of
Chukchia and Alaska ...

> > "Euro-
> > Anatolic" or similar would seem to be a more logical label, wouldn't
> it?
>
> This is like the complaint that "Afrasiatic" is a bad label for a
> language
> family because it doesn't cover all the languages of Africa and Asia.
> Habent sua fata nomines.

I can't figure that Latin out, but I didn't claim I was making a sensible
point!

                                                   Andreas