Overview

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the recent 'discovery' of Sanskrit and its relation with Persian and European languages led to a systematic investigation into the history of what came to be known as the Indo-European language group, in the process of which the methodology of historical and comparative linguistics was developed. During this formative period scholars proved the 'generic' relationship of the Indo-European language 'family', based on a historical comparison of the morphology, phonology and etymology of the various languages in this group. The earliest systematic comparisons of Indo-European languages were made in the treatises by Franz Bopp (1791-1867) on the inflectional endings of verbs in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic (1816), and Rasmus Kristian Rask (1787-1832) on the origin of old Norse or Icelandic language (written in 1814) in which he showed that the words of various Indo-European languages bear a formal relation in matters of sound. Bopp later expanded and systematized his researches in his Comparative Grammar of the main Indo-European languages, published in several parts between 1833 and 1852. In a lecture before the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1838, Bopp also provided grammatical proof that the Celtic languages formed part of the Indo-European language group. The other pioneering scholars in this period were Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and August Friedrich Pott (1802-87). Grimm's unrivalled Deutsche Grammatik, published in four massive volumes between 1819-1837, is in fact a comparative grammar of the Germanic languages (discussing mainly Gothic, Scandinavian, English, Frisian, Dutch and German) and it remains to this day the cornerstone of Germanic comparative philology. Finally, in his two volume, 'Etymological Investigations' (1833, 1836), August Pott attempted to reconstruct Indo-European phonology and laid the foundations for our modern etymologies of this language group. This set accurately reflects the historical emergence of this discipline which was to have an enormous influence on 19th century thought and culture. Each volume is available individually at a price of .0 0 Volume 1: Uber das Conjugationssytem der Sanskritsprache, Franz Bopp (1816), 0-415-20463-1 Volume 2: Undersogelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse, Rasmus Kristian Rask (1818) 0-415-20464-X Volume 3: Deutsche Grammatik (First Edition), Jacob Grimm (1819) 0-415-20465-8 Volume 4: Deutsche Grammatik (Second Edition), Jacob Grimm (1822) 0-415-20466-6 Volume 5: Deutsche Grammatik (Third Edition), Jacob Grimm (1840) 0-415-20467-4 Volume 6: Deutsche Grammatik (Volume 2), Jacob Grimm (1826) 0-415-20468-2 Volume 7: Deutsche Grammatik (Volume 3), Jacob Grimm (1831) 0-415-20469-0 Volume 8: Deutsche Grammatik (Volume 4), Jacob Grimm (1837) 0-415-20470-4 Volume 9: Register zu J. Grimms Deutsche Grammatik, K. G. Anderson (1865) 0-415-20471-2 Volume 10: Vergleichende Grammatik (Parts 1-3), Franz Bopp, (1833, 1835, 1837) 0-415-20472-0 Volume 11: Vergleichende Grammatik (Parts 4-6), Franz Bopp 0-415-20473-9 Volume 12: Etymologische Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der indo-germanischen Sprachen (Volume 1), August Friedrich Pott (1833) 0-415-20474-7 Volume 13: Etymologische Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der indo-germanischen Sprachen (Volume 2), August Friedrich Pott (1836) 0-415-20475-5

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