ABSTRACT
By the early decades of this century Indo-European studies were equipped with large and well-considered presentations on the parent language, the early dialects and the cultural background of their speakers. These were based on theoretical views that had been expressed most forcefully at the beginning of the neogrammarian movement, but, as noted in chapters 1-3, also earlier, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Indo-Europeanists were concerned with structure, indeed innermost structure. They sought to determine that structure by mastering the data. The data of the early texts were to be treated like information obtained about spoken languages of the present. Respect for data kept them from publishing revisions of hypotheses simply by examining those proposed by their predecessors as bases for intellectual gamesmanship. And when new information was provided, as after the discovery of Tocharian, the Anatolian languages and Mycenaean Greek, the articles and monographs that treated them did not begin with a section on some "theorist" or some specific "theory"; rather, they presented the data and then proposed their interpretation on the basis of long-accepted procedures and theory.
