Laudator Temporis Acti

Joshua T. Katz, "Etymological 'Alterity': Depths and Heights," in Shane Butler, ed., Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), pp. 107–126 (at 107-108, with notes on 121):

I am by training a shallow classicist — my degrees are in linguistics rather than in Greek and Latin — but my interest in Classics is deep. Indeed, it is in some ways extraordinarily deep. My PhD dissertation, for example, which had the glamorous title 'Topics in Indo-European Personal Pronouns' (Katz 1998), took on the task of explaining the internal morphology of this small class of small words, most of them mono- and disyllables, that made their way from Proto-Indo-European into Greek, Latin, English and the many other related languages flung far across the globe from India to Ireland and from Brno to Bristol — words like me, you and us. Proto-Indo-European is the reconstructed ancestral tongue spoken on the Pontic-Caspian steppe some 5,500 years ago, thousands of years before our earliest records,¹ and the personal pronouns have been called this language's 'Devonian rocks' because (to quote from the simultaneously delightful and authoritative American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots of Calvert Watkins, who also happened to be the adviser of my pronominal thesis and about whom more will be said later) they 'belong to the very earliest layer of Indo-European that can be reached by reconstruction' and '[t]heir forms are unlike those of any other paradigms in the language' (Watkins 2011: xxii). The metaphor 'Devonian rocks'² takes us just two counties and a few dozen miles from Bristol but a good 400 million years back in deep time, to what is sometimes called the 'Age of the Fishes', and while the force of the description is to emphasize the greatly archaic and seemingly impenetrable nature of the pronominal beast, what my dissertation attempted to do was delve inside forms such as you in English, nōs 'we, us' in Latin and the peculiar Homeric second-person dual σφῶϊ(ν) to figure out where they come from and how they fit into the larger linguistic system.

As a firm believer in the importance of knowledge for its own sake, I make no apologies for writing 300 pages on such a topic.

1 The geographical and temporal details are controversial; Fortson (2010) provides the best overview.

2 Which goes back to Lancashire native Joshua Whatmough (thus Watkins apud Katz 1998: 1).