Ronald Crossland

thumb|The role of the Indo-European peoples in the ancient world has been portrayed too often as the incarnation of northern virility sweeping down in massed chariots to bring new vigour to a decadent south. ~ R. Crossland Ronald Arthur Crossland (31 August 1920 – 29 January 2006) was an English classical scholar who was Professor of Greek at Sheffield University from 1958 to 1982. He was a leading expert on Hittite philology and linguistics. Quotes The role of the Indo-European peoples in the ancient world has been portrayed too often as the incarnation of northern virility sweeping down in massed chariots to bring new vigour to a decadent south. Crossland, R. A. 1971 “Immigrants from the North.” Chap. 28 of Cambridge Ancient History. 3d ed. Vol. 1, p art 2: 824—76. p 826 Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. quoted in Sir Edmund Leach. Aryan invasions over four millennia. In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990, It is disappointing to have to say that at present there seems to be no hope of estimating objectively and with a useful degree of precision how long an originally homogeneous Indo-European language would have taken to develop into derivative groups or languages which diverged as much as Greek, Sanskrit and Hittite did when the earliest texts in them were composed. Some linguists seem to think that they can make intuitive judgements about the minimum time which a particular phonetic or other change in a language would have taken. But the results of intuition when applied to estimating the minimum time in which a group of cognate languages or dialects would have differentiated to an observed extent vary so much that no useful deductions can be made from them. I sympathize with archaeologists and other prehistorians who are not primarily linguists over this. Linguists are unable to provide the information which would be most useful. Crossland, Ronald. 1972. "Recent Reappraisal of Evidence for the Chronology of the Differentiation of Indo-European." In Acta of the 2nd International Colloquium on Aegean Prehistory (46-55). Athens: Ministry of Culture and Science. Crossland (1972) quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 12 External links Category:1920 births Category:2006 deaths Category:Academics from the United Kingdom Category:Linguists from England