Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania, Sino-Platonic Papers, Number 7 November 1988. - p. 1-56During the past two hundred years, many suggestions were made in regard to relationships of Indo-European to other languages such as Semitic, Altaic, Austronesian, Korean etc., but Indo- Europeanists commonly rejected such attempts for want of convincing evidence. As to Chinese, Joseph Edkins was the first to advance the thesis of its proximity to Indo-European. In his work "China's Place in Philology. An Attempt to show that the Language of Europe and Asia have a Common Origin" (1871) he presented a number of Chinese words similar to those of Indo-European.
In his time, Edkins' thesis seemed bold and extravagant. But today, more than a hundred years later, we are in a much better position to carry out a comprehensive and well-founded comparative study.
