Principles of historical hypothesis

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 499.

The rise of comparative historical linguistics in the first half of the 19* century was prepared by the philological activities of William Jones ( 1746-1794). Jones discovered affinity for Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Persian and some other languages. He drew a conclusion that they originated from the same parent language which might no longer exist.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845) divided languages into three types: I) isolating (those without inflectional morphology and with word order assuming grammatical significance, like Chinese); 2) agglutinating (those which use affixes, like Turkish); 3) inflecting (those which present accidence, like Sanskrit).

Franz Bopp (1791-1867) invented the term • Indo-European. He got fame as the founder of the science of comparative philology.

Jacob Grimm's (1785-1863) Grammar is generally considered the foundation of Germanic philology. In 1848 he postulated close relationships of Germanic languages with the Baltic and Slavic ones.

Rasmus Rask's (1787-1832) survey of the relationship with Thracian contains a well-known statement concerning the First Consonant Shift in Germanic languages. For the Germanic branch Rask used the term Gothic, which he divided into Scandinavian and Germanic.

Rask's most famous work is "or An Investigation concerning the source of the Old Northern Icelandic Language”.

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) believed that the basic form of all languages must be the same. Humboldt considers Sanskrit the optimal language-type because of its developed inflectional forms.

The Indo-European family of languages consists of a number of brandies, including Romance, Gennanic, Celtic, Baltic, Slavic, Indo-lranian, Armenian, Greek, Albanian, Hiltite and Tocharian languages.

It has been clarified that the ancient Germans belonged to the western division of the Indo-European speech community. As the Indo-Europeans extended in their migrations over a larger territory, the Germans moved further north than other tribes and settled on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea in the region of the Elbe.