Dante divided the three major European language families into Germanic, Latin and Greek.
J.J. Scaliger (1540- 1609) divided the world languages into four major language families (Romanesque, Greek, Germanic and Slavic) and seven minor language families.
17 Swedish scholars Stenheim and Yajie.
German gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, 1646- 17 16.
Vocabulary, language survey reports, bilingual dictionaries and written records have been compiled and published one after another. The most famous work of investigation and comparison is Mitridati written by German scholar John Christopher Adelung.
1786, william jones of Britain (1746- 1794) read a paper at the Royal Society of Asia in Kolkata, which confirmed the historical kinship between Sanskrit and Latin, Greek and Germanic languages.
Germany has established Sanskrit professors and historical linguistics professors in universities.
2. Danish scholar R.K. Lasker1782-1832
One of the founders of historical linguistics, The Origin of Old Scandinavian or Icelandic clearly put forward the methods and principles of comparative linguistics for the first time.
3. German scholar jacob green (1785- 1863)
18 19 german grammar volume I: comparative grammar of Germanic languages
The second edition of German Grammar 1822 discusses the consistency between Germanic and other Indo-European consonants, that is, Green's Law.
1875 Carl Werner, a Danish linguist, discovered Werner's law in view of the shortcomings of Green's law.
4. William von Humboldt (1767- 1835)
Diversity of human language structure
Distinguish three language types: isolated language, cohesive language and inflectional language.
5. August Schleicher (182 1- 1868)
Handbook of Comparative Grammar of Indo-European Languages 186 1
Theory of Linguistic Affinity: Linguistic Pedigree Diagram
Comparative methods of reconstructing the original text
Language classification
6. Study on vowel alternation in the process of reconstructing the original Indo-European language.
August Schleicher made a wrong assumption.
Scholars have found that the original Indo-European language should have five vowels: /a, I, U, E, o/.
German scholar Bruggeman found that nasal and flowing sounds can also be used as * * * sounds, that is, semi-vowels.
1878, Saussure put forward a new hypothesis in On the Primitive System of Vowels in Indo-European Language Family, but it did not attract much attention. The discovery of Polish scholar Kulovic from 65438 to 0927 proved that Saussure's theory was completely correct, that is, throat sound theory.
7. New grammar school
65438+ appeared in1University of Leipzig, Germany in the late 9th century.
Representative figures are Karl bruggeman, August Lesken, Herman Osthoff, Herman Paul and berthold delbruck.
Basic principles: Historical linguistics is interpretive, and the interpretation must be based on linguistic facts, limiting the scope of investigation and finding the basis from history. There are two reasons for language changes: pronunciation methods and psychological factors.
Pay attention to data and materials, but not to language theory.