People behind Historical Linguistics

M.T. 31401418

Sir William Jones – An English philologist living in India, origin of modern historical linguistics often traced back to him.

Danish Scholars Rasmus Rask and Karl Vener and the German scholar Jacob Grimm. – Developed the comparative method (19th Century).

August Schleicher – First linguist to offer reconstructed forms from a proto-language.

Franz Bopp – A German linguist, the first professional who made the comparison between the Indo-European languages in 1816 and demonstrated that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit shared a common structure and a common lexicon.

Rasmus Christian Rask – Developed the principle of regular sound changes to explain his observation of similarities between individual words in Germanic language and their cognate Greek and Latin.

Jacob Grimm – Made use of the comparative method in attempting to show the development of the Germanic languages from a common origin, the first systematic study of diachronic language change.

Karl Verner – made a methodological breakthrough when he identified a pattern now known as Verner’s law.

Yehuda Quraysh – compared the phonology and morphology of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic.

Janos Sajnovics – In 1770, he attempted to demonstrate the relationship between Sami and Hungarian.

Marcus van Boxhorn – First described a rigid methodology for historical linguistics comparisons and proposed the existence of an Indo-European proto-language(which called “Scythian”).

Andreas Jager (1686) and William Wotton (1713) – they developed further the Scythian theory.

Lambert ten Kate – First formulated the regularity of sound laws, introducing among others, the term root vowel.

Friedrich Schlegel – In 1808 first stated the importance of using the eldest possible form of a language when trying to improve its relationship.