Today, a long guest posting on intellectual history, specifically on the transmission of ideas in linguistics, in particular on the innovation and spread of linguistic terminology. This is an immensely scholarly follow-up to my 4/15/24 posting “Greek-letter variables and the Sanskrit ruki class”, in which I reproduced a 1970 Linguistic Inquiry squib of mine with that title and wrote:
and then there’s the question of the useful ruki terminology, whose history [the Indo-Europeanist Michael L. Weiss (Professor of Linguistics and Classics at Cornell)] has been trying to trace (this squib might have been the source of its spread throughout the linguistic literature)
Today’s guest post is the current fruit of Michael Weiss’s RUKIstorical investigations, with minimal intrusions in his text by comments from me.
