A Brief History of 18th and 19th Century Linguistics in Relation to Indo-

European Studies

Over the course of the late 18th and through the 19th century a

number of important discoveries and the development of new analytic

methods allowed philologists to develop a much deeper understanding of

how many of the languages used in Europe and parts of Asia were related.

Certain similarities between a number of languages in a large part of Europe

and parts of Asia, especially India, had philologists proposing the idea of an

original source language or "proto" language as early as the end of the 17th

century, but it was not until "The Sanskrit Language," published in 1786 by

Sir William Jones, that the idea of a common earlier language became widely

disseminated. Based on his study of Sanskrit, Jones postulated that

similarities between Greek, Latin and Sanskrit could be explained by an

original language from which the other three sprang1. Further comparison of

Sanskrit and inflections in other languages such as Gothic, Latin and Greek

provided further evidence of the high probability of an original or "proto"

language.

But Jones insights into the relationship between Sanskrit, Greek,

Latin and German and the interest they generated in Sanskrit had another,

possibly even more important impact on the field of what would come to be

known as linguistics. Hindu grammarians had already developed a complex

and detailed collection of writings on the structure of the Sanskrit language,

including the "internal and external changes that might alter their meaning

or grammatical function.2" The early linguists of the eighteenth and

nineteenth century used this knowledge to further understand how

languages developed and to invent what became known as the comparative

method.

When two languages show a, "pattern of similarities and differences

that is so detailed…that both languages are changed forms of what was

1 Baugh, A & Cable T (1993). A History of the English Language (5th Edition). London: Routledge p. 202 Mallory, J.P. & Adams, D.Q. (2006) The Oxford introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European world Oxford: Oxford University Press.  pp. 39-41

once a single language," these languages are said to be of the same

language family3. The early linguists came to recognize that the languages

of India, the great Iranian Plain, the Hellenic world, Italy and its

surroundings, the Slavic and Baltic languages of eastern Europe, the

languages of the Germanic lands, and the Celtic languages all fell within the

same family which, as early as 1813 was already being referred to as Indo-

European. Comparative method takes two languages which belong to the

same language family and by a detailed comparison determine which

characteristics of the daughter languages might have come from the

original proto-language.

Using the comparative method, In 1822 Jacob Grimm proposed a

system of sound laws which could account for the relationship of certain

consonants in German and the corresponding consonant in Sanskrit, Greek

and Latin. Grimm postulated, based on these sound laws, that a p in Indo-

European, while retaining the same sound in Latin and Greek, would change

into an ƒ in the Germanic languages. The Latin piscis pronounced as fish in

German is one example of a proof of the rule. The formulation of these

correspondence became known as Grimm's Laws4.

But while these laws could account for a number of differences

between the Indo-European languages, there were still differences which

seemed to break the laws as formulated by Grimm. It was not until 1875

that Karl Verner showed how certain exceptions to Grimm's law could be

explained if one took into account other factors such as neighboring

phonemes or the position of an accent. This recognition that changes in

sound could be accounted for by secondary or adjacent factors eventually

became known as Verner's Laws and showed a marked shift in

understanding through their recognition that what at first seemed a simple

one-to-one correlation between language sounds could in fact be influenced

and obscured by other factors5.

In 1879, Ferdinand de Saussure proposed a theory positing the

3 Sihler, A. L. (2000) Language History: An Introduction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins p. 1354 Baugh, A & Cable T. pp. 21-225 Baugh, A & Cable T. Ibid. p. 22

existence of a set of sounds units that were not present in any of the then

known Indo-European languages. These sound units, which he called sonant

coefficients, were later identified as laryngeal consonants. This

extrapolation of a language backwards in time based on comparing later

forms of the language became known as the method of internal

reconstruction and has led many to consider Saussure as being the father of

modern structural linguistics6. Saussure's sound units were merely a

hyphothetical unit and as such caused their own problems until the

discovery of Hittite in the 20th century provided the first concrete proof of

laryngeals having been used in a Indo-European language7. In some

respects, Saussure's theories and approach, while taking place at the end of

the 19th century, became the basis for linguistics in the first half of the 20th

century.

By the end of the 19th century, early linguistits had identified 9

groups of languages which belonged to the Indo-European family of

languages and which had all descended from the original proto-Indo-

European. They exhibited similarities and differences to each other roughly

in line with their geographical distance from one another. In 1890 Peter von

Bradke published "Concerning Method and Conclusions of Aryan

(Indogermanic) Studies" in which he grouped the then known languages of

the Indo-European group into two large categories which became known as

the satem-centum isogloss. This split was represented in the pronunciation

of the word 100 in Avestan (satem) and Latin (centum), representative

languages of each group. And while the reasons for this split and its

development are now recognized as being unable to provide us with

information as to migration patterns, it is still useful to speak about the

satem and centum languages8.

As can be seen the 18th and 19th centuries were a time of

significant development in the understanding of language. Scholars, using

texts from as old as 1500 BC in India, cuneiform inscriptions from the great

6 Fox, A. (1995) Linguistic Reconstruction: an ntroduction to theory and method. New York: Oxford University Press. pp.169-1817 Mallory, J.P. Ibid. pp 48-498 Baugh, A & Cable T. Ibid. pp. 39-40

plateau of Iran, the great Homeric poems of 8th Century B.C. Greece and

more were able to gain a much fuller understanding of how language

developed and the relationship between languages, not just geographically,

but also temporally as well. And perhaps most amazing of all, using the

tools that they developed, by the beginning of the 20th century the early

linguists were able to reconstruct a language which, while having been

unheard for upwards of 4000 years, is still recognized as the direct ancestor

of all the languages within the Indo-European language family.