The entry of the Indian notion of root into Western linguistics

Most Indo-European (IE) scholars of the 19th century denied the reality of the IE root. This fact is surprising since they are the same scholars who introduced the concept of root into Western language science and based the whole construction of the IE family on it. The present paper provides an explanation for such an incongruity. The minimum unit of language in 17th and in the 18th century Western language science was the word (minus inflection), whereas the minimum unit of Indian linguistics was the root. The encounter of these two traditions in the early 19th century caused a propulsive clash: on the one hand, the Western model of language analysis had no place for units smaller than the word and, on the other hand, Bopp based his demonstration of the IE hypothesis precisely on the notion of root, which was clearly a unit smaller than the word. Therefore the theoretical bases of the newborn IE linguistics, which included the notion of root, conflicted with the theoretical bases of the former Western tradition, which had the word as its minimum unit. Due to this contrast, Western scholars used the root in the practice of IE research, but denied its reality. They in fact either considered it as an abstraction of the Indian grammarians or confused it with the word (minus inflection).