Émile Benveniste

Émile Benveniste was the Sorbonne structural linguist whose Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (1969, English: Indo-European Language and Society) mapped the social, legal, and religious lexicon of the Indo-European world through the reconstruction of its root-terms. For the Seba lineage, his method is indispensable: he reads institutions through words and words through institutions, so that the oldest vocabulary of the Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Germanic worlds becomes a window onto the religious-psychological life of the Indo-European imagination.

Benveniste is load-bearing for the tradition at two specific points. His late lectures on the middle-voice — the grammatical form in which subject and action are not cleanly separated — gave the philological basis for the Seba reading of the verbs of reverence, grief, suffering, and erotic subjection: sebomai, aidoumai, pascho, himeromai. And his treatment of the vocabulary of eusebeia and the sacred — the Indo-European roots of awe and holy trembling — supplies the genealogical ground for the entire Seba vocabulary of reverence. See benveniste-indo-european-language for the main work.

Relationships

• benveniste-indo-european-language
• middle-voice
• eusebeia