Português
As the great explorations of the European Renaissance were expanding in space and through time — new worlds were discovered on new continents, and ancient worlds and civilizations once thought lost were rediscovered — language was a key part of this expansion: Europeans began learning an ever wider range of languages, some so forgotten that even their names had been lost, if they had ever been known at all. More and more “exotic” languages came to light, and so did the surviving texts of Europe’s own ancient languages, recovered and studied for the first time (Latin excepted, since its tradition had never been interrupted).
The humanists of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries thus gradually brought into the sphere of European scholarship ancient Greek, effectively rediscovered through the new Erasmian pronunciation, Hebrew and Arabic, Persian and Turkish, as well as Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, Runic, Celtic, and a few others. To these were subsequently added the languages of India, China, Indochina, and the New World.
The wonder at this linguistic diversity, unforeseen by the classical tradition, gave rise to entirely new fields of scholarship. Grammars were now written for languages never described before — what Auroux (1994) calls grammatisation — and forgotten scripts were deciphered or learned for the first time. And, to the great surprise of the humanists, linguistic similarities came to light between languages far apart from one another, in space as in time. Linguistic comparativism was born: first as a historical curiosity, then as an antiquarian passion, until, after a few centuries, this line of inquiry matured into the academic science of comparative grammar — Bopp’s Indo-European linguistics.
But Bopp did not come out of nowhere. The rise of the comparative-reconstructive method was preceded by a long period of gestation and methodological refinement. The road that led there was tortuous, populated by both brilliant minds and charlatans (and sometimes by brilliant charlatans). We can identify a few main strands that led from these early comparative experiments to nineteenth-century academic linguistics.
The first consists in the gradual accumulation of data on linguistic diversity: Conrad Gessner’s Mithridates (1555), one of the earliest systematic surveys of the world’s languages, used the Lord’s Prayer as a comparative sample in twenty-two languages; this model was subsequently expanded and enriched in successive polyglot collections, culminating in Adelung and Vater’s Mithridates (1806–1817), which covered nearly five hundred languages and dialects.
The second concerns grammars and general grammatical theory: from medieval Latin grammars, scholars moved on to grammars of the vernaculars and then of the newly discovered or rediscovered languages. The break with Latin was difficult and very slow, but with Port-Royal the idea of a universal grammar became firmly established. That such a grammar was at first still modelled on Latin hardly matters: it was nonetheless a step of enormous importance.
The third strand consists in the emergence of the first comparative word lists. Among the earliest were Franciscus Raphelengius’s lists of Persian-Dutch lexical parallels, which attracted considerable attention among Dutch and German humanists and reinforced the idea of a special relationship between the Germanic peoples and the Persians. This idea was partly encouraged by a humanist misreading of Herodotus’s Germanioi, described as one of the Persian tribes in Hist. 1.125. Raphelengius’s observations remained unpublished, but Bonaventura Vulcanius drew on them in 1597 in what appears to be the first published list of Persian-Germanic lexical parallels. Later, Mylius (1612), Jäger (1686), and Wachter (1737), among others, continued to adduce Persian-Germanic correspondences and to develop broader hypotheses concerning the historical relationship among European and Asian languages (see Metcalf 1954; Alfieri 2023; Keidan 2018; 2026).
Meanwhile, in the Semitic domain, Ravius (1648) drew up the first comparison lists of Semitic roots, arguing that the kinship of these languages emerges precisely from the kinship of their roots, perhaps coinciding with the primae voces of the original human language (see Alfieri 2017).
Generally speaking, hypotheses of a non-biblical kind about the origin of the languages spoken today go back to the late sixteenth century, when Goropius Becanus (1569) and Stevin (1586) tried to replace Hebrew with a Germanic language as the original “Adamitic” tongue (see Borst 1957–63; Metcalf 1974; 2013; Droixhe 1978; Considine 2008; Demonet 1992; McLelland 2010; 2011; Swiggers 1984; Lindner 2016). It is in this vein that, as early as the early seventeenth century, M. Z. Boxhorn grouped Welsh, German, Russian, Celtic, Turkish, Latvian, Lithuanian and Persian, alongside the classical languages, into a single language family — a fully plausible list (except for Turkish).
Word-lists and kinship hypotheses of this kind, however methodologically fragile, anticipated the later idea of regular sound correspondences — the “sound laws” by which linguistic kinship would eventually be proved.
A separate line of inquiry compared inflectional paradigms rather than individual words. Stiernhielm (1671: 77) noted affinities in verbal inflection between Latin and German (see Lindner 2016a), and Saumaise (1643: II, 2–3) — later followed by Leibniz and Kanne — spoke of a common “Scythian” origin for German, Persian, Latin and Greek, again on the basis of shared verbal inflection (see Droixhe 1978; Koerner 1990). It was this attention to inflection, more than to vocabulary, that anticipated Bopp’s own method of demonstrating kinship through the comparison of conjugational systems.
As it turned out, these lists, without their proponents realizing it, were not entirely devoid of scientific truth. Since the languages compared were — as we now know — for the most part actually Indo-European or Semitic languages, the similarities found are no longer a surprise, but the regular outcome of linguistic kinship.
The similarities initially found were, so to speak, “macroscopic”; the less evident similarities — the “microscopic” ones, that is, the regular correspondences — were discovered only much later. But already in the 1600s and 1700s many lexical correspondences were observed, compiled and discussed between languages that would later be assigned to the Indo-European and Semitic families.
It was probably above all the Romantic climate of the early nineteenth century that favoured the crystallization of scientific comparativism as an academic discipline. But, apart from Sanskrit, the basic knowledge needed for the birth of this discipline had already been available earlier, even though it went unnoticed: the world was not yet ready.
This period is unjustly neglected in the teaching of the history of linguistics as “prescientific”. However, “scientific” linguistics should certainly be understood as a continuation, a development of these studies, rather than as a meteor that suddenly illuminates the minds of nineteenth-century philologists.
This workshop aims to explore precisely this dimension: the significance, achievements and failures, and ideological contribution of prescientific comparativism to the development of scientific linguistics.
We invite proposals on any of the following topics:
the history of the (re)discovery of non-European languages: both ancient and contemporary “exotic” ones;
the history of early grammar writing for languages other than Latin;
the history of the first comparative experiments: lexical lists, kinship theories, etc.;
the ideological and scientific links between pre-Bopp comparatists and the founding fathers of the comparative-reconstructive method;
ideological conditions and political ideas that favoured hypotheses of interlinguistic kinship and motivated the emergence of lexical comparison lists;
the history of the theoretical adaptation of traditional grammar to the needs of languages other than the classical ones.
Possible participants (in alphabetical order):
Paola Cotticelli-Kurras, University of Verona
Pietro U. Dini, University of Pisa
Josef Eskhult, Uppsala University
Jean-Marie Fournier, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris
Thomas Lindner, Salzburg University
Toon van Hal, KU Leuven
Raf van Rooy, KU Leuven
Pierre Swiggers, KU Leuven
References
Alfieri, Luca. 2017. “A proposito di Thomas Lindner, 200 Jahre Indogermanistik (Salzburg-Wien 2016), ovvero la rilevanza della Grammer di Ravio (1648) per la storia della linguistica indoeuropea”, in Archivio Glottologico Italiano 102(2): 225-237.
Alfieri, Luca. 2023. La morfologia derivazionale e il problema del tempo. Milano: Mimesis.
Auroux, Sylvain. 1994. La révolution technologique de la grammatisation. Liège: Mardaga.
Bonfante, Giuliano. 1953–54. “Ideas of the Kinship of the European Languages from 1200 to 1800”, in Cahiers d’Histoire Mondial 3: 679-699.
Borst, Arno. 1957–63. Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker. Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann.
Considine, John. 2008. Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Demonet, Marie-Luce. 1992. Les Voix du signe: nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480-1580). Paris: Champion.
Droixhe, Daniel. 1978. La linguistique et l’appel de l’histoire (1600-1800): rationalisme et révolutions positivistes. Genève: Droz.
Gessner, Conrad. 1555. Mithridates. Typis VVolphianis.
Goropius Becanus, Joannes. 1569. Origines Antwerpianae. Antwerp: Ch. Plantini.
Ihre, Johan. 1769. Glossarium Suiogothicum. Upsaliæ typis Edmannianis.
Jäger, Andreas. 1686. De lingua vetustissima Europae scythoceltica et gothica. Wittembergae: ex typiis Schödteri.
Keidan, Artemij. 2018. “Characteribus belgicis: alcuni aspetti della ricezione del gotico nell'Umanesimo fiammingo e olandese”. AIΩN-Linguistica n. s. 7: 87–112.
Keidan, Artemij. In print. “Champollion and the runes: sources, influences and motivations”. To appear on Historiographia Linguistica.
Koerner, Konrad E.F. 1990. “The Place of Friedrich Schlegel in the Development of Historical-Comparative Linguistics”. In De Mauro T. & Formigari L. (eds.), Leibniz, Humboldt, and the Origins of the Comparativism, 239-261. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Lindner, Thomas. 2016a. 200 Jahre Indogermanistik. Monographisch-historiographischer Teil. Edition Tandem: Salzburg-Wien.
Lindner, Thomas. 2016b. “Der präkomparatistische Sprachvergleich von Moses über Leibniz bis zum 16. Mai 1816”, in Historische Sprachforschung 129: 221-232.
McLelland, Nicola. 2010. “Justus Georgius Schottelius (1612–1676) and European Linguistic Thought”, in Historiographia Linguistica 37(1-2): 1-30.
McLelland, Nicola. 2011. J.G. Schottelius’s Ausführliche Arbeit von der Teutschen HaubtSprache (1663) and its place in early modern European vernacular language study, Blackwell, Oxford.
Metcalf, George J. 1953. “Abraham Mylius on historical linguistics”, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 68: 535-54.
Metcalf, George J. 1974. “The Indo-European Hypothesis in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”. In D. Hymes (ed.), Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms, 233–257. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Metcalf, George J. 2013. On Language Diversity and Relationship from Bibliander to Adelung. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Mylius, Abraham van der. 1612. De lingua belgica, sive de linguis illius comunitate tum cum plerisque aliis, tum presertim cum latina, graeca, persica, deque communitatis illius causis, tum de linguis illius origine et latissima per nationes quamplurima diffusione, ut et de ejus praestantia. Lugduni Batavorum: U. Cornelii et G. Abrahami.
Ravius, Christian. 1650 [16481]. A Generall Grammer for the ready attaining of the Ebrew, Samaritan, Calde, Syriac, Arabic and the Ethiopic Languages. London: W. Wilson.
Rousseau, Jean. 2001. “La genèse de la grammaire comparée”. In S. Auroux et al. (eds.), History of Language Science. An International Handbook of the Evolution of the Study of Language from the Beginnings to the Present. Vol. II: 1197-1210. Berlin – New York: De Gruyter.
Saumaise, Claude. 1643. De hellenistica commentarius, controversia de lingua hellenistica decidens et plenissime pertractans originem ac dialectos graecae linguae. Lugdum: ex officiis Elseviriorum.
Stevin, Simon. 1586. De weeghdaet. Leiden: Plantijn; rist. 1955, in E. Crone (ed.), The Principal Works of Simon Stevin, Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger.
Stiernhielm, Georg. 1671. De linguarum origine praefatio, in Jesu Christi SS Evangelia ab Ulfila [...] ex Graeco Gothice translata. Stockholm: Wankif.
Swiggers, Pierre. 1984. “Adrianus Schrieckius: de la langue des Scythes à l’Europe linguistique”, Histoire Épistémologie Langage 6(2): 17-35.
Wachter, Johannes G. 1737 [17271]. Glossarium germanicum, continens originem et antiquitates totius linguae germanicae, 2 voll. Lipsiae: J.B. Gleditsch.
The humanists of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries thus gradually brought into the sphere of European scholarship ancient Greek, effectively rediscovered through the new Erasmian pronunciation, Hebrew and Arabic, Persian and Turkish, as well as Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, Runic, Celtic, and a few others. To these were subsequently added the languages of India, China, Indochina, and the New World.
The wonder at this linguistic diversity, unforeseen by the classical tradition, gave rise to entirely new fields of scholarship. Grammars were now written for languages never described before — what Auroux (1994) calls grammatisation — and forgotten scripts were deciphered or learned for the first time. And, to the great surprise of the humanists, linguistic similarities came to light between languages far apart from one another, in space as in time. Linguistic comparativism was born: first as a historical curiosity, then as an antiquarian passion, until, after a few centuries, this line of inquiry matured into the academic science of comparative grammar — Bopp’s Indo-European linguistics.
But Bopp did not come out of nowhere. The rise of the comparative-reconstructive method was preceded by a long period of gestation and methodological refinement. The road that led there was tortuous, populated by both brilliant minds and charlatans (and sometimes by brilliant charlatans). We can identify a few main strands that led from these early comparative experiments to nineteenth-century academic linguistics.
The first consists in the gradual accumulation of data on linguistic diversity: Conrad Gessner’s Mithridates (1555), one of the earliest systematic surveys of the world’s languages, used the Lord’s Prayer as a comparative sample in twenty-two languages; this model was subsequently expanded and enriched in successive polyglot collections, culminating in Adelung and Vater’s Mithridates (1806–1817), which covered nearly five hundred languages and dialects.
The second concerns grammars and general grammatical theory: from medieval Latin grammars, scholars moved on to grammars of the vernaculars and then of the newly discovered or rediscovered languages. The break with Latin was difficult and very slow, but with Port-Royal the idea of a universal grammar became firmly established. That such a grammar was at first still modelled on Latin hardly matters: it was nonetheless a step of enormous importance.
The third strand consists in the emergence of the first comparative word lists. Among the earliest were Franciscus Raphelengius’s lists of Persian-Dutch lexical parallels, which attracted considerable attention among Dutch and German humanists and reinforced the idea of a special relationship between the Germanic peoples and the Persians. This idea was partly encouraged by a humanist misreading of Herodotus’s Germanioi, described as one of the Persian tribes in Hist. 1.125. Raphelengius’s observations remained unpublished, but Bonaventura Vulcanius drew on them in 1597 in what appears to be the first published list of Persian-Germanic lexical parallels. Later, Mylius (1612), Jäger (1686), and Wachter (1737), among others, continued to adduce Persian-Germanic correspondences and to develop broader hypotheses concerning the historical relationship among European and Asian languages (see Metcalf 1954; Alfieri 2023; Keidan 2018; 2026).
Meanwhile, in the Semitic domain, Ravius (1648) drew up the first comparison lists of Semitic roots, arguing that the kinship of these languages emerges precisely from the kinship of their roots, perhaps coinciding with the primae voces of the original human language (see Alfieri 2017).
Generally speaking, hypotheses of a non-biblical kind about the origin of the languages spoken today go back to the late sixteenth century, when Goropius Becanus (1569) and Stevin (1586) tried to replace Hebrew with a Germanic language as the original “Adamitic” tongue (see Borst 1957–63; Metcalf 1974; 2013; Droixhe 1978; Considine 2008; Demonet 1992; McLelland 2010; 2011; Swiggers 1984; Lindner 2016). It is in this vein that, as early as the early seventeenth century, M. Z. Boxhorn grouped Welsh, German, Russian, Celtic, Turkish, Latvian, Lithuanian and Persian, alongside the classical languages, into a single language family — a fully plausible list (except for Turkish).
Word-lists and kinship hypotheses of this kind, however methodologically fragile, anticipated the later idea of regular sound correspondences — the “sound laws” by which linguistic kinship would eventually be proved.
A separate line of inquiry compared inflectional paradigms rather than individual words. Stiernhielm (1671: 77) noted affinities in verbal inflection between Latin and German (see Lindner 2016a), and Saumaise (1643: II, 2–3) — later followed by Leibniz and Kanne — spoke of a common “Scythian” origin for German, Persian, Latin and Greek, again on the basis of shared verbal inflection (see Droixhe 1978; Koerner 1990). It was this attention to inflection, more than to vocabulary, that anticipated Bopp’s own method of demonstrating kinship through the comparison of conjugational systems.
As it turned out, these lists, without their proponents realizing it, were not entirely devoid of scientific truth. Since the languages compared were — as we now know — for the most part actually Indo-European or Semitic languages, the similarities found are no longer a surprise, but the regular outcome of linguistic kinship.
The similarities initially found were, so to speak, “macroscopic”; the less evident similarities — the “microscopic” ones, that is, the regular correspondences — were discovered only much later. But already in the 1600s and 1700s many lexical correspondences were observed, compiled and discussed between languages that would later be assigned to the Indo-European and Semitic families.
It was probably above all the Romantic climate of the early nineteenth century that favoured the crystallization of scientific comparativism as an academic discipline. But, apart from Sanskrit, the basic knowledge needed for the birth of this discipline had already been available earlier, even though it went unnoticed: the world was not yet ready.
This period is unjustly neglected in the teaching of the history of linguistics as “prescientific”. However, “scientific” linguistics should certainly be understood as a continuation, a development of these studies, rather than as a meteor that suddenly illuminates the minds of nineteenth-century philologists.
This workshop aims to explore precisely this dimension: the significance, achievements and failures, and ideological contribution of prescientific comparativism to the development of scientific linguistics.
We invite proposals on any of the following topics:
the history of the (re)discovery of non-European languages: both ancient and contemporary “exotic” ones;
the history of early grammar writing for languages other than Latin;
the history of the first comparative experiments: lexical lists, kinship theories, etc.;
the ideological and scientific links between pre-Bopp comparatists and the founding fathers of the comparative-reconstructive method;
ideological conditions and political ideas that favoured hypotheses of interlinguistic kinship and motivated the emergence of lexical comparison lists;
the history of the theoretical adaptation of traditional grammar to the needs of languages other than the classical ones.
Possible participants (in alphabetical order):
Paola Cotticelli-Kurras, University of Verona
Pietro U. Dini, University of Pisa
Josef Eskhult, Uppsala University
Jean-Marie Fournier, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris
Thomas Lindner, Salzburg University
Toon van Hal, KU Leuven
Raf van Rooy, KU Leuven
Pierre Swiggers, KU Leuven
References
Alfieri, Luca. 2017. “A proposito di Thomas Lindner, 200 Jahre Indogermanistik (Salzburg-Wien 2016), ovvero la rilevanza della Grammer di Ravio (1648) per la storia della linguistica indoeuropea”, in Archivio Glottologico Italiano 102(2): 225-237.
Alfieri, Luca. 2023. La morfologia derivazionale e il problema del tempo. Milano: Mimesis.
Auroux, Sylvain. 1994. La révolution technologique de la grammatisation. Liège: Mardaga.
Bonfante, Giuliano. 1953–54. “Ideas of the Kinship of the European Languages from 1200 to 1800”, in Cahiers d’Histoire Mondial 3: 679-699.
Borst, Arno. 1957–63. Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker. Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann.
Considine, John. 2008. Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Demonet, Marie-Luce. 1992. Les Voix du signe: nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480-1580). Paris: Champion.
Droixhe, Daniel. 1978. La linguistique et l’appel de l’histoire (1600-1800): rationalisme et révolutions positivistes. Genève: Droz.
Gessner, Conrad. 1555. Mithridates. Typis VVolphianis.
Goropius Becanus, Joannes. 1569. Origines Antwerpianae. Antwerp: Ch. Plantini.
Ihre, Johan. 1769. Glossarium Suiogothicum. Upsaliæ typis Edmannianis.
Jäger, Andreas. 1686. De lingua vetustissima Europae scythoceltica et gothica. Wittembergae: ex typiis Schödteri.
Keidan, Artemij. 2018. “Characteribus belgicis: alcuni aspetti della ricezione del gotico nell'Umanesimo fiammingo e olandese”. AIΩN-Linguistica n. s. 7: 87–112.
Keidan, Artemij. In print. “Champollion and the runes: sources, influences and motivations”. To appear on Historiographia Linguistica.
Koerner, Konrad E.F. 1990. “The Place of Friedrich Schlegel in the Development of Historical-Comparative Linguistics”. In De Mauro T. & Formigari L. (eds.), Leibniz, Humboldt, and the Origins of the Comparativism, 239-261. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Lindner, Thomas. 2016a. 200 Jahre Indogermanistik. Monographisch-historiographischer Teil. Edition Tandem: Salzburg-Wien.
Lindner, Thomas. 2016b. “Der präkomparatistische Sprachvergleich von Moses über Leibniz bis zum 16. Mai 1816”, in Historische Sprachforschung 129: 221-232.
McLelland, Nicola. 2010. “Justus Georgius Schottelius (1612–1676) and European Linguistic Thought”, in Historiographia Linguistica 37(1-2): 1-30.
McLelland, Nicola. 2011. J.G. Schottelius’s Ausführliche Arbeit von der Teutschen HaubtSprache (1663) and its place in early modern European vernacular language study, Blackwell, Oxford.
Metcalf, George J. 1953. “Abraham Mylius on historical linguistics”, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 68: 535-54.
Metcalf, George J. 1974. “The Indo-European Hypothesis in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”. In D. Hymes (ed.), Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms, 233–257. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Metcalf, George J. 2013. On Language Diversity and Relationship from Bibliander to Adelung. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Mylius, Abraham van der. 1612. De lingua belgica, sive de linguis illius comunitate tum cum plerisque aliis, tum presertim cum latina, graeca, persica, deque communitatis illius causis, tum de linguis illius origine et latissima per nationes quamplurima diffusione, ut et de ejus praestantia. Lugduni Batavorum: U. Cornelii et G. Abrahami.
Ravius, Christian. 1650 [16481]. A Generall Grammer for the ready attaining of the Ebrew, Samaritan, Calde, Syriac, Arabic and the Ethiopic Languages. London: W. Wilson.
Rousseau, Jean. 2001. “La genèse de la grammaire comparée”. In S. Auroux et al. (eds.), History of Language Science. An International Handbook of the Evolution of the Study of Language from the Beginnings to the Present. Vol. II: 1197-1210. Berlin – New York: De Gruyter.
Saumaise, Claude. 1643. De hellenistica commentarius, controversia de lingua hellenistica decidens et plenissime pertractans originem ac dialectos graecae linguae. Lugdum: ex officiis Elseviriorum.
Stevin, Simon. 1586. De weeghdaet. Leiden: Plantijn; rist. 1955, in E. Crone (ed.), The Principal Works of Simon Stevin, Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger.
Stiernhielm, Georg. 1671. De linguarum origine praefatio, in Jesu Christi SS Evangelia ab Ulfila [...] ex Graeco Gothice translata. Stockholm: Wankif.
Swiggers, Pierre. 1984. “Adrianus Schrieckius: de la langue des Scythes à l’Europe linguistique”, Histoire Épistémologie Langage 6(2): 17-35.
Wachter, Johannes G. 1737 [17271]. Glossarium germanicum, continens originem et antiquitates totius linguae germanicae, 2 voll. Lipsiae: J.B. Gleditsch.