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    Inference: Rasmus Rask

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    Janella Salvanez
    The document summarizes the development of the field of historical linguistics and the discovery of the Indo-European language family. It discusses how early scholars like Sir William Jones in the late 18th century noted similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. This led to the establishment of the Indo-European language family in the 19th century to include other groups like Slavic and Baltic. Figures like Franz Bopp and Rasmus Rask demonstrated methodically the connections between language groups by comparing verb morphology and sounds. Jacob Grimm's work in the 1820s analyzed characteristic Indo-European vowel and consonant patterns. The family continued to be expanded through the 19th century with the addition of Celtic, Al

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    Inference: Rasmus Rask

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    Janella Salvanez
    29 views1 page
    The document summarizes the development of the field of historical linguistics and the discovery of the Indo-European language family. It discusses how early scholars like Sir William Jones in the late 18th century noted similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. This led to the establishment of the Indo-European language family in the 19th century to include other groups like Slavic and Baltic. Figures like Franz Bopp and Rasmus Rask demonstrated methodically the connections between language groups by comparing verb morphology and sounds. Jacob Grimm's work in the 1820s analyzed characteristic Indo-European vowel and consonant patterns. The family continued to be expanded through the 19th century with the addition of Celtic, Al

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    Sanskrit report

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    The document summarizes the development of the field of historical linguistics and the discovery of the Indo-European language family. It discusses how early scholars like Sir William Jones in the late 18th century noted similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. This led to the establishment of the Indo-European language family in the 19th century to include other groups like Slavic and Baltic. Figures like Franz Bopp and Rasmus Rask demonstrated methodically the connections between language groups by comparing verb morphology and sounds. Jacob Grimm's work in the 1820s analyzed characteristic Indo-European vowel and consonant patterns. The family continued to be expanded through the 19th century with the addition of Celtic, Al

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    29 views1 page

    Inference: Rasmus Rask

    Uploaded by

    Janella Salvanez
    The document summarizes the development of the field of historical linguistics and the discovery of the Indo-European language family. It discusses how early scholars like Sir William Jones in the late 18th century noted similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. This led to the establishment of the Indo-European language family in the 19th century to include other groups like Slavic and Baltic. Figures like Franz Bopp and Rasmus Rask demonstrated methodically the connections between language groups by comparing verb morphology and sounds. Jacob Grimm's work in the 1820s analyzed characteristic Indo-European vowel and consonant patterns. The family continued to be expanded through the 19th century with the addition of Celtic, Al

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 1

    The ancient Greeks and Romans readily perceived that their languages were related to each other but an

    accurate idea of the true bounds of the Indo-European family became possible only when, in the 16th century,
    Europeans began to learn Sanskrit.
     The massive similarities between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek were noted early, but the first person to make
    the correct inference and state it conspicuously was the British Orientalist and jurist Sir William Jones, who in
    1786 said in his presidential address to the Bengal Asiatic Society that Sanskrit bore to both Greek and Latin
    Nineteenth-century linguists firmly established the connections that Jones had elucidated and broadened the
    family to include Slavic, Baltic, and other language groups.

     Franz Bopp,
    in which the relation of these five languages was demonstrated on the basis of a detailed comparison of
    verb morphology (structure). 
    Danish philologist Rasmus Rask
    This work demonstrated methodically the relation of Germanic to Latin, Greek, Slavic, and Baltic. (Rask
    included Celtic a few years later.)

    In 1822 the second edition of the first volume of Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik (“Germanic Grammar”)
    was published. In this grammar were discussed the peculiar Indo-European vowel alternations called Ablaut by
    Grimm (e.g., English sing, sang, sung; or Greek peíth-ō ‘I persuade,’ pé-poith-a ‘I am persuaded,’ é-pith-on ‘I
    persuaded’). In addition, Grimm tried to find the principle behind the correspondences of
    Germanic stop and spirant consonants (the first made with complete stoppage of the breath, and the second
    made with constriction of the breath but not complete stoppage) to the consonants of other Indo-European
    languages. The sound changes implied by these correspondences have become known as Grimm’s law.
    Examples of it include the stop consonant p in Latin pater corresponding to the spirant consonant f in father,
    and the correspondences between English and Greek t, d, and th discussed above.

    Bopp demonstrated in 1839 that the Celtic languages were Indo-European, as had been asserted by Jones. In
    1850 the German philologist August Schleicher did the same for Albanian, and in 1877 another German
    philologist, Heinrich Hübschmann, showed that Armenian was an independent branch of Indo-European,
    rather than a member of the Iranian subbranch. Since then the Indo-European family has been enlarged by the
    discovery of Tocharian languages and of Hittite and the other Anatolian languages and by the recognition, with
    the aid of Hittite, that Lycian, known and partly deciphered already in the 19th century, belongs to the
    Anatolian branch of Indo-European.

    The first full comparative grammar of the major Indo-European languages was Bopp’s Vergleichende
    Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Altslawischen, Gotischen und
    Deutschen (1833–52; “Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic,
    and German”). But this and Schleicher’s shorter Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der
    indogermanischen Sprachen (1861–62; “Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European
    Languages”) were rendered obsolete by the major breakthrough of the 1870s
    -------------slide------
    The difference between Gothic d in fadar ‘father’ and þ in broþar ‘brother,’ for example, both corresponding
    to t in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, proved to be correlated with the original position of the accent, a discovery
    known as Verner’s law (named for the Danish linguist Karl Verner). Thus, d appears when the preceding
    syllable was originally unaccented (fadar: Greek patér-, Sanskrit pitár-), and þ occurs when the preceding
    syllable was originally accented (broþar: Greek phrā́ter- ‘member of a clan,’ Sanskrit bhrā́tar-).

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