engleski

A List of Sanskrit and Latin Cognates in Vesdin’s Treatise De Latini Sermonis Origine

Filip Vesdin, better known by his monastic name Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo, authored two rather short linguistic treatises, which can rightfully be considered the first published studies on the kinship of the Indo-European languages illustrated with a list of cognate words. The first treatise is De antiquitate et affinitate linguae zendicae, samscrdamicae, et germanicae dissertatio from 1798, and the second, the subject of this study, is entitled De Latini sermonis origine et cum orientalibus linguis connextione dissertatio published in Rome in 1802. It discusses the history of the Latin language and its connection to the “Oriental” languages illustrated with a word-list. This study will therefore attempt to evaluate how successful Vesdin was in identifying Sanskrit and Latin cognates. Vesdin’s original list is divided into: a) acceptable identifications, b) unacceptable identifications, c) loanwords and d) other cases. Despite relying on highly unreliable phono-semantic correspondences and a rather naïve and unsystematic procedure that occasionally ignored phonetic correspondences in favor of semantic resemblances, Vesdin was successful in identifying 200 cognates out of 260 entries. Four entries are loanwords and 56 words are either not accepted as cognates in modern scholarship, have no established etymology, or cannot be identified at present.

etymology, cognate, indo-european, latin, sanskrit

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