Against Greek-Centric Abstractionism Generation, Quantity, and the Misordering of Semantic History Greek-centric historical linguistics has long suffered from a systematic inversion of semantic chronology. By privileging abstract lexical forms preserved in Classical Greek—particularly adjectives of quantity such as πολλά (“many”)—it mistakes philological visibility for semantic primacy. This error is not incidental; it is structural. At the core of this paradigm lies an unexamined assumption: that the earliest attestable abstractions in Greek texts reflect the earliest stages of linguistic meaning itself. This assumption collapses immediately when confronted with cognitive, typological, and anthropological evidence. 1. The Greek fallacy: abstraction as origin Greek-centric models routinely treat abstract categories—number, measure, plurality—as primary semantic units, simply because they are lexicalized early in written Greek. This is a methodological fallacy. Writing preserves late c...
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