Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

The linguistics encyclopedia 256
works were not matched in the west until at least the seventeenth century. Nor were they
equalled in grammatical analysis which involved ordered rules of word formation and
extreme economy of statement. For example, a finished product such as abhavat ‘he, she
was’ from a root form bhu ‘to be’, may be seen to pass through successive representation
in an ordered sequence.
The identification of roots and affixes in ancient Sanskrit grammar inspired the
concept of the morpheme in modern analysis, aided by the studies of Arabic and Hebrew,
breaking away from the Thrax-Priscian word and paradigm pedagogical model of
early Greek and Latin language studies.
THE IMPACT OF SANSKRIT ON THE WEST
The introduction of Sanskrit and its subsequent study in Europe was a prime inducement
to comparative-historical linguistics. It came at an auspicious time: from Dante on,
various but sporadic attempts had been made to shed light on relationships between
languages and their historical developments and the time was right for more cohesive
views of historical studies. It is generally accepted that the nineteenth century is the era
par excellence of comparative-historical linguistics—a century in which most of the
linguistic efforts were devoted to this subject, led, in the main, by German scholarship.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
A few of the best-known historical linguists of the early nineteenth century are the Dane,
Rasmus Rask, and the Germans, Franz Bopp and Jacob Grimm. With these scholars
comparative-historical linguistic studies of Indo-European languages had a definite
beginning.
In his book Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder published in 1808, Friedrich von
Schlegel (1772–1829) used the term vergleichende Grammatik ‘comparative grammar’
and in 1816, Bopp published a work comparing the verbal conjugations of Sanskrit,
Persian, Latin, Greek, and German. After adding Celtic and Albanian, he called these the
Indo-European family of languages. Bopp has often been considered the father of Indo-
European linguistics.
Rask (1787–1832) wrote the first systematic grammars of Old Norse and of Old
English and, in 1818, he published a comparative grammar outlining the Scandinavian
languages and noting their relationships to one another. Through comparisons of word
forms, he brought order into historical relationships matching a letter of one language to a
letter in another, so that regularity of change could be observed.
Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), a contemporary of Bopp (1787–1832), restricted his
studies to the Germanic family, paying special attention to Gothic due to its historical
value of having been committed to writing in the fourth century. This endeavour allowed
him to see more clearly than anyone before him the systematic nature of sound change.
Within the framework of comparative Germanic, he made the first statements on the
nature of umlaut (see p. 198 below) and ablaut, or, as it is sometimes called vowel
gradation (as found, for example, in German sprechen, sprach, gesprocheri), and
developed, more fully than Rask, the notion of Lautverschiebung or sound shift, which