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Accessed: 8/21/20
Franz Bopp
Born: 14 September 1791, Mainz, Electorate of Mainz
Died: 23 October 1867 (aged 76), Berlin, Province of Brandenburg
School: Romantic linguistics[1]
Institutions: University of Berlin
Notable students: Wilhelm Dilthey
Main interests: Linguistics
Notable ideas: Comparative linguistics
Influences: Pāṇini, Friedrich Schlegel
Influenced: Max Müller; Michel Bréal; August Schleicher[2]
Franz Bopp (German: [ˈfʁants ˈbɔp]; 14 September 1791 – 23 October 1867)[a] was a German linguist known for extensive and pioneering comparative work on Indo-European languages.
Early life
Bopp was born in Mainz, but the political disarray in the Republic of Mainz caused his parents' move to Aschaffenburg, the second seat of the Archbishop of Mainz. There he received a liberal education at the Lyceum and Karl Joseph Hieronymus Windischmann drew his attention to the languages and literature of the East. (Windischmann, along with Georg Friedrich Creuzer, Joseph Görres, and the brothers Schlegel, expressed great enthusiasm for Indian wisdom and philosophy.) Moreover, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel's book, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Speech and Wisdom of the Indians, Heidelberg, 1808), had just begun to exert a powerful influence on the minds of German philosophers and historians, and stimulated Bopp's interest in the sacred language of the Hindus.[4]
Career
In 1812, he went to Paris at the expense of the Bavarian government, with a view to devoting himself vigorously to the study of Sanskrit. There he enjoyed the society of such eminent men as Antoine-Léonard de Chézy (his primary instructor),...
[Antoine-Léonard de Chézy] was born at Neuilly. His father, Antoine de Chézy (1718–1798), was an engineer who finally became director of the École des Ponts et Chaussées.École des Ponts ParisTech (originally called École nationale des ponts et chaussées or ENPC, also nicknamed Ponts) is a university-level institution of higher education and research in the field of science, engineering and technology. Founded in 1747 by Daniel-Charles Trudaine, it is one of the oldest and one of the most prestigious French Grandes Écoles...
Following the creation of the Corps of Bridges and Roads in 1716, the King's Council decided in 1747 to found a specific training course for the state's engineers, as École royale des ponts et chaussées. In 1775, the school took its current name as École nationale des ponts et chaussées, by Daniel-Charles Trudaine, in a moment when the state decided to set up a progressive and efficient control of the building of roads, bridges and canals, and in the training of civil engineers.
The school's first director, from 1747 until 1794, was Jean-Rodolphe Perronet, engineer, civil service administrator and a contributor to the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. Without lecturer, fifty students (among whom Lebon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Pierre-Simon Girard, Riche de Prony, Méchain and Brémontier), initially taught themselves geometry, algebra, mechanics and hydraulics. Visits of building sites, cooperations with scientists and engineers and participation to the drawing of the map of the kingdom used to complete their training, which was usually four to twelve years long.
During the First French Empire run by Napoleon I from 1804 to 1814, a number of members of the Corps of Bridges and Roads (including Barré de Saint-Venant, Belgrand, Biot, Cauchy, Coriolis, Dupuit, Fresnel, Gay-Lussac, Navier, Vicat) took part in the reconstruction of the French road network that had not been maintained during the Revolution, and in large infrastructural developments, notably hydraulic projects. Under the orders of the emperor, French scientist Gaspard Riche de Prony, second director of the school from 1798 to 1839, adapts the education provided by the school in order to improve the training of future civil engineers, whose purpose is to rebuild the major infrastructures of the country: roads, bridges, but also administrative buildings, barracks and fortifications. Prony is now considered as a historical and influential figure of the school. During the twenty years that followed the First Empire, the experience of the faculty and the alumni involved in the reconstruction strongly influenced its training methods and internal organisation. In 1831, the school opens its first laboratory, which aims at concentrating the talents and experiences of the country's best civil engineers. The school also gradually becomes a place of reflection and debates for urban planning.
As a new step in the evolution of the school, the decree of 1851 insists on the organisation of the courses, the writing of an annual schedule, the quality of the faculty, and the control of the students’ works. For the first time in its history, the school opens its doors to a larger public. At this time, in France, the remarkable development of transports, roads, bridges and canals is strongly influenced by engineers from the school (Becquerel, Bienvenüe, Caquot, Carnot, Colson, Coyne, Freyssinet, Résal, Séjourné), who deeply modernised the country by creating the large traffic networks, admired in several European countries.
-- École des ponts ParisTech, by Wikipedia
The son was intended for his father's profession; but in 1799 he obtained a post in the oriental manuscripts department of the national library. In about 1803, he began studying Sanskrit, and although he possessed no grammar or dictionary, he succeeded in acquiring sufficient knowledge of the language to be able to compose poetry in it.
In Paris sometime between 1800 and 1805, Friedrich Schlegel's wife Dorothea introduced him to the Wilhelmine Christiane von Klencke, called Hermina or Hermine, who, extremely unusually for the time, was a very young divorcée who had come to Paris to be a correspondent for German newspapers.Helmina von Chézy (26 January 1783 – 28 February 1856), née Wilhelmine Christiane von Klencke, was a German journalist, poet and playwright. She is known for writing the libretto for Carl Maria von Weber's opera Euryanthe (1823) and the play Rosamunde, for which Franz Schubert composed incidental music.
Helmina was born in Berlin, the daughter of Prussian officer Carl Friedrich von Klencke and his wife Caroline Louise von Klencke (1754–1802), daughter of Anna Louisa Karsch and herself a poet. The marriage of her parents had already broken up at her birth and she was partly raised by her grandmother. She started writing at the age of 14.
Married the first time in 1799, she divorced the next year and upon the death of her mother moved to Paris, where she worked as a correspondent for several German papers. From 1803 to 1807 she edited her own Französische Miszellen ("French Miscellanea") journal, commenting on political issues, which earned her trouble with the ubiquitous censors.
In Paris she befriended Friedrich Schlegel's wife Dorothea, who introduced her to the French orientalist Antoine-Léonard de Chézy. In 1805 they married and Helmina subsequently gave birth to two sons: the later author Wilhelm Theodor von Chézy (1806–1865) and Max von Chézy (1808–1846), who became a painter. In 1810, together with Adelbert von Chamisso, she translated several of Friedrich Schlegel's lectures from French into German. They had a short romantic fling, followed by another extramarital affair of Helmina with the Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, probably the father of another son who died shortly after his birth in 1811.
As her second marriage too turned out to be an unhappy one, Helmina finally parted from her husband in 1810. She returned to Germany, where she alternately lived in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Aschaffenburg and Amorbach. In 1812 she settled in Darmstadt. She witnessed the German campaign of the Napoleonic Wars as a military hospital nurse in Cologne and Namur. After she had openly criticised the miserable conditions in the field, she was accused of libel, but was acquitted by the Berlin Kammergericht court under presiding judge E. T. A. Hoffmann.
From 1817 she lived in Dresden, where she wrote the libretto of Carl Maria von Weber's opera Euryanthe. Weber appreciated her writing but disliked her unbound ambition, speaking of her as a "suave poetess but unbearable woman". Several of her Romantic poems were set to music and Franz Schubert wrote incidental music for her play Rosamunde, which however flopped when it premiered in 1823 at the Vienna Theater an der Wien. Living in Vienna from 1823, she again became politically involved, calling attention to the inhumane working conditions at the saltworks in the Austrian Salzkammergut region. She met Beethoven who was one of her heroes growing up and became good friends with Beethoven and attended his funeral in 1827
--Helmina von Chézy, by Wikipedia
In 1805 they married and Helmina subsequently gave birth to two sons: the author Wilhelm Theodor von Chézy (1806–1865) and Max von Chézy (1808–1846), who became a painter. However, the marriage was ultimately not a success, and the couple parted, although did not divorce, in 1810. De Chézy continued to make annual payments for her support until his death.
He was the first professor of Sanskrit appointed in the Collège de France (1815), where his pupils included Alexandre Langlois, Auguste-Louis-Armand Loiseleur-Deslongchamps and especially Eugène Burnouf, who would become his successor at the Collège on his death in 1832.
He was a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, and a member of the Académie des Inscriptions.
-- Antoine-Léonard de Chézy, by Wikipedia
Silvestre de Sacy,...
Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy (French: [sasi]; 21 September 1758 – 21 February 1838), was a French nobleman, linguist and orientalist. His son, Ustazade Silvestre de Sacy, became a journalist.
Silvestre de Sacy was born in Paris to a notary named Jacques Abraham Silvestre, a Jansenist. He was born into an ardently Catholic bourgeois family...
In 1781 he was appointed councillor in the cour des monnaies, and was promoted in 1791 to be a commissary-general in the same department.The Cour des monnaies (French pronunciation: [kuʁ de mɔnɛ], Currency Court) was one of the sovereign courts of Ancien Régime France. It was set up in 1552. It and the other Ancien Régime tribunals were suppressed in 1791 after the French Revolution.
The regulation of coin-making was royal regulation par excellence and very soon became the object of strict surveillance and dedicated judicial institutions. Monetary crimes were particularly severely punished, and coin clipping and counterfeiting could be punishable by death. At first monetary justice was exercised by généraux des monnaies, but in 1346 this passed to a dedicated Chambre des monnaies, set up in 1358 at the Palais de la Cité in buildings adjoining the Chambre des comptes. Appeals against sentences passed in the Chambre des monnaies were taken to the Parlement until January 1552, when the Chambre was turned into a sovereign court called the Cour des monnaies. The pioneering historian of the French language and medieval French literature, Claude Fauchet, served as President of the Cour des monnaies from 1581-1599.
-- Cour des monnaies, by Wikipedia
Having successively studied Semitic languages, he began to make a name as an orientalist, and between 1787 and 1791 deciphered the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings. In 1792 he retired from public service, and lived in close seclusion in a cottage near Paris till in 1795 he became professor of Arabic in the newly founded school of living Eastern languages (École speciale des langues orientales vivantes)...
In 1806 he added the duties of Persian professor to his old chair, and from this time onwards his life was one of increasing honour and success, broken only by a brief period of retreat during the Hundred Days.
He was perpetual secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions from 1832 onwards; in 1808 he had entered the corps législatif; he was created a baron of the French Empire by Napoleon in 1813; and in 1832, when quite an old man, be became a peer of France and regularly spoke in the Chamber of Peers (Chambre des Pairs). In 1815 he became rector of the University of Paris, and after the Second Restoration he was active on the commission of public instruction. With Abel Rémusat, he was joint founder of the Société asiatique, and was inspector of oriental typefaces at the Imprimerie nationale. In 1821 he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.
Silvestre de Sacy was the first Frenchman to attempt to read the Rosetta stone. He made some progress in identifying proper names in the demotic inscription.
From 1807 to 1809, Sacy was also a teacher of Jean-François Champollion, whom he encouraged in his research.
But later on, the relationship between the master and student became chilly. In no small measure, Champollion's Napoleonic sympathies were problematic for Sacy, who was decidedly Royalist in his political sympathies.
-- Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, by Wikipedia
Louis Mathieu Langlès, and, above all Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824), cousin of the American statesman of the same name, who had acquired an acquaintance with Sanskrit when in India and had brought out, along with Langlès, a descriptive catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscripts of the Imperial Library.[4]
In the library, Bopp had access not only to the rich collection of Sanskrit manuscripts (mostly brought from India by Jean François Pons in the early 18th century), but also to the Sanskrit books that had been issued from the Calcutta and Serampore presses. He spent five years of laborious study, almost living in the libraries of Paris and unmoved by the turmoils that agitated the world around him, including Napoleon's escape, the Waterloo campaign and the Restoration.
The first paper from his years of study in Paris appeared in Frankfurt am Main in 1816, under the title of Über das Konjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache (On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit in comparison with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic), to which Windischmann contributed a preface. In this first book, Bopp entered at once the path on which he would focus the philological researches of his whole subsequent life. His task was not to point out the similarity of Sanskrit with Persian, Greek, Latin or German, for previous scholars had long established that, but he aimed to trace the postulated common origin of the languages' grammatical forms, of their inflections from composition. This was something no predecessor had attempted. By a historical analysis of those forms, as applied to the verb, he furnished the first trustworthy materials for a history of the languages compared.[4]
After a brief sojourn in Germany, Bopp travelled to London where he made the acquaintance of Sir Charles Wilkins and Henry Thomas Colebrooke. He also became friends with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian ambassador at the Court of St. James's, to whom he taught Sanskrit. He brought out, in the Annals of Oriental Literature (London, 1820), an essay entitled "Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic Languages" in which he extended to all parts of grammar what he had done in his first book for the verb alone. He had previously published a critical edition, with a Latin translation and notes, of the story of Nala and Damayanti (London, 1819), the most beautiful episode of the Mahabharata. Other episodes of the Mahabharata, Indralokâgama, and three others (Berlin, 1824); Diluvium, and three others (Berlin, 1829); a new edition of Nala (Berlin, 1832) followed in due course, all of which, with August Wilhelm von Schlegel's edition of the Bhagavad Gita (1823), proved excellent aids in initiating the early student into the reading of Sanskrit texts. On the publication, in Calcutta, of the whole Mahabharata, Bopp discontinued editing Sanskrit texts and confined himself thenceforth exclusively to grammatical investigations.[4]
After a short residence at Göttingen, Bopp gained, on the recommendation of Humboldt, appointment to the chair of Sanskrit and comparative grammar at the University of Berlin in 1821, which he occupied for the rest of his life. He also became a member of the Royal Prussian Academy the following year.[6]
In 1827, he published his Ausführliches Lehrgebäude der Sanskritsprache (Detailed System of the Sanskrit Language), on which he had worked since 1821. Bopp started work on a new edition in Latin, for the following year, completed in 1832; a shorter grammar appeared in 1834. At the same time he compiled a Sanskrit and Latin Glossary (1830), in which, more especially in the second and third editions (1847 and 1868–71), he also took account of the cognate languages. His chief activity, however, centered on the elaboration of his Comparative Grammar, which appeared in six parts at considerable intervals (Berlin, 1833, 1835, 1842, 1847, 1849, 1852), under the title Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Altslawischen, Gotischen und Deutschen (Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend [Avestan], Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavonic, Gothic and German).[7]
How carefully Bopp matured this work emerges from the series of monographs printed in the Transactions of the Berlin Academy (1824–1831), which preceded it.[7] They bear the general title Vergleichende Zergliederung des Sanskrits und der mit ihm verwandten Sprachen (Comparative Analysis of Sanskrit and its related Languages).[8] Two other essays (on the Numerals, 1835) followed the publication of the first part of the Comparative Grammar. Old Slavonian began to take its stand among the languages compared from the second part onwards. E. B. Eastwick translated the work into English in 1845. A second German edition, thoroughly revised (1856–1861), also covered Old Armenian.[7]
In his Comparative Grammar Bopp set himself a threefold task:
1. to give a description of the original grammatical structure of the languages as deduced from their inter-comparison.
2. to trace their phonetic laws.
3. to investigate the origin of their grammatical forms.
The first and second points remained dependent upon the third. As Bopp based his research on the best available sources and incorporated every new item of information that came to light, his work continued to widen and deepen in the making, as can be witnessed from his monographs on the vowel system in the Teutonic languages (1836), on the Celtic languages (1839), on the Old Prussian (1853) and Albanian languages (Über das Albanesische in seinen verwandtschaftlichen Beziehungen, Vienna, 1854), on the accent in Sanskrit and Greek (1854), on the relationship of the Malayo-Polynesian to the Indo-European languages (1840), and on the Caucasian languages (1846). In the last two, the impetus of his genius led him on a wrong track.[7] He is the first philologist to prove Albanian as a separate branch of Indo-European.[9] Bopp was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855.[10]
Criticism
Critics have charged Bopp with neglecting the study of the native Sanskrit grammars, but in those early days of Sanskrit studies, the great libraries of Europe did not hold the requisite materials; if they had, those materials would have demanded his full attention for years, and such grammars as those of Charles Wilkins and Henry Thomas Colebrooke, from which Bopp derived his grammatical knowledge, had all used native grammars as a basis. The further charge that Bopp, in his Comparative Grammar, gave undue prominence to Sanskrit is disproved by his own words; for, as early as 1820, he gave it as his opinion that frequently, the cognate languages serve to elucidate grammatical forms lost in Sanskrit (Annals of Or. Lit. i. 3), which he further developed in all his subsequent writings.[7]
The Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition of 1911) assesses Bopp and his work as follows:[7]
Bopp's researches, carried with wonderful penetration into the most minute and almost microscopical details of linguistic phenomena, have led to the opening up of a wide and distant view into the original seats, the closer or more distant affinity, and the tenets, practices and domestic usages of the ancient Indo-European nations, and the science of comparative grammar may truly be said to date from his earliest publication. In grateful recognition of that fact, on the fiftieth anniversary (May 16, 1866) of the date of Windischmann's preface to that work, a fund called Die Bopp-Stiftung, for the promotion of the study of Sanskrit and comparative grammar, was established at Berlin, to which liberal contributions were made by his numerous pupils and admirers in all parts of the globe. Bopp lived to see the results of his labours everywhere accepted, and his name justly celebrated. But he died, on the 23rd of October 1867, in poverty, though his genuine kindliness and unselfishness, his devotion to his family and friends, and his rare modesty, endeared him to all who knew him.[7]
English scholar Russell Martineau, who had studied under Bopp, gave the following tribute:[5]
Bopp must, more or less, directly or indirectly, be the teacher of all who at the present day study, not this language or that language, but language itself — study it either as a universal function of man, subjected, like his other mental or physical functions, to law and order, or else as an historical development, worked out by a never ceasing course of education from one form into another.[11]
Martineau also wrote:
"Bopp's Sanskrit studies and Sanskrit publications are the solid foundations upon which his system of comparative grammar was erected, and without which that could not have been perfect. For that purpose, far more than a mere dictionary knowledge of Sanskrit was required. The resemblances which he detected between Sanskrit and the Western cognate tongues existed in the syntax, the combination of words in the sentence and the various devices which only actual reading of the literature could disclose, far more than in the mere vocabulary. As a comparative grammarian he was much more than as a Sanskrit scholar, ... [and yet] it is surely much that he made the grammar, formerly a maze of Indian subtilty, as simple and attractive as that of Greek or Latin, introduced the study of the easier works of Sanskrit literature and trained (personally or by his books) pupils who could advance far higher, invade even the most intricate parts of the literature and make the Vedas intelligible. The great truth which his Comparative Grammar established was that of the mutual relations of the connected languages. Affinities had before him been observed between Latin and German, between German and Slavonic, etc., yet all attempts to prove one the parent of the other had been found preposterous.[11]
Notes
1. Formerly sometimes anglicized as Francis Bopp[3]
References
1. Angela Esterhammer (ed.), Romantic Poetry, Volume 7, John Benjamins Publishing, 2002, p. 491.
2. Hadumod Bussmann, Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, Routledge, 1996, p. 85.
3. Baynes 1878, p. 49.
4. Chisholm 1911, p. 240.
5. Rines 1920, p. 261.
6. Chisholm 1911, pp. 240–241.
7. Chisholm 1911, p. 241.
8. Rines 1920, p. 262.
9. Lulushi, Astrit (22 October 2013). "Histori: Çfarë ka ndodhur më 22 tetor?" [History: what happened on 22 October?] (in Albanian). New York: Dielli.
10. "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 15 September 2016.
11. Rines 1920, p. 261 cites Martineau 1867
Sources
• Baynes, T. S., ed. (1878), "Francis Bopp" , Encyclopædia Britannica, 4 (9th ed.), New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 49–50
• Martineau, Russell (1867), "Obituary of Franz Bopp", Transactions of the Philological Society, London: 305–14
Attribution
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911), "Bopp, Franz", Encyclopædia Britannica, 4 (11th ed.), Cambridge University Press, pp. 240–241
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920), "Bopp, Franz" , Encyclopedia Americana, 4, pp. 261–262
External links
Franz Bopp, "A Comparative Grammar, Volume 1", 1885, at the Internet Archive.