Bopp, Franz
The founder of the science of comparative philology, and one of the pioneers of Sanskrit
studies in Germany, born at Mayence, September 14th, 1791. His parents having removed to
Aschaffenburg, the young Bopp there attended the gymnasium, and afterwards enjoyed the
instruction of Windischmann. At the suggestion of Windischmann, he went to Paris in 1812 to
continue his studies in Oriental languages, especially in Sanskrit, and after five years in
Paris to London, where he remained until 1820. During his sojourn in Paris and London he
received from the Bavarian Academy of Sciences an annual stipend of 1000 florins. In 1820 he
was anxious to be made Professor of Sanskrit at Würzburg, but the authorities
considered it entirely unnecessary to create a chair for that language. In the following year,
however, the brothers Von Humboldt, after great exertions in his behalf, had him
appointed
professor extraordinarius for Oriental languages and the
science of language at Berlin, where he was made a member of the Academy in 1822, and
professor ordinarius in 1825—a position in which he was active
until stricken with apoplexy in 1864. He died October 23d, 1867.
His principal works in the field of comparative philology are:
Ueber das
Conjugationssystem der Sanskrit-Sprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen,
lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache (Frankfort-on-the-Main,
1816), published in an English translation in 1819;
Vergleichende
Grammatik des Sanskrit, Send, Armenischen, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litauischen,
Altslawischen, Gotischen und Deutschen (Berlin, 1833-52; second edition 1856-61,
third edition, posthumously, 1868-71);
Die keltischen Sprachen in ihrem
Verhältnisse zum Sanskrit u. s. w. (Berlin, 1839);
Ueber das Albanesische in seinen verwandtschaftlichen Beziehungen
(Berlin, 1855);
Vergleichendes Accentuationssystem (Berlin,
1854). His Sanskrit publications include considerable extracts from the
Mahabhârata, very valuable works on Sanskrit grammar, and the
Glossarium Sanscritum.
Bopp was not, it is true, the first to remark upon the striking resemblance of Sanskrit to
the classical and other European languages. That resemblance had been observed before 1588 by
Filippo Sassetti, and subsequently by many others, noticeably by Père
Cœurdoux in 1767, and by Sir William Jones in 1786; Jones claimed a common origin
for Sanskrit, Persian, Greek,
Latin, Gothic, and
Keltic—an idea carried out in much greater detail by Friedrich von Schlegel
(q.v.) in 1808. It was, however, reserved for Bopp to put this startling doctrine (for such,
and even preposterous, it seemed to most classical scholars of that day) upon a scientific
basis; and this he did, at the early age of twenty-five. His predecessors had noted chiefly
the resemblances between individual words of Sanskrit and those other languages; Bopp turned
his gaze upon the grammatical structure of all these tongues, and was convinced of its
substantial identity in them all. The results of his investigations are embodied in the
Conjugationssystem. The same method was thereafter applied successfully to the
investigation of other families of speech. Bopp's object was, however, not merely the
comparison of languages—this was with him only the means to an end—he
sought to explain by this method the genesis of inflectional forms. His views on this point
seem to have passed through three stages of development.
1.
The first stage is represented by the
Conjugationssystem of 1816. Friedr.
von Schlegel (
Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 1808) had divided
all languages into two groups, the
inflectional and the
agglutinative; inflection he called exclusively an
inner change
of the word, and denied to “suffixes” a derivation from originally
independent words. Bopp adopted Schlegel's theory, but expanded it thus: a word may not only
modify itself internally, but may absorb the “verbum substantivum,”
esse.
Bopp was clearly still under the influence of a doctrine commonly held at that time, that
every sentence is necessarily a reflection of a logical judgment; as the result of this
doctrine he declares that in strictness there can exist but one real verb, the verb
to be.
2.
Three years later, in the English edition of the
Conjugationssystem, Bopp
adopted the principle of
composition to account
for inflectional forms. The doctrine of roots had been advanced in Europe some forty years
before, and Bopp, finding it not only substantiated by the structure of Sanskrit, but also
expressed in detail by the ancient Hindû grammarians, made it his own task to
account for the existing forms of language. A more important deviation from Schlegel's views
is Bopp's derivation of the personal endings of the verb from the personal
pronouns—an idea probably obtained indirectly from observation of the Semitic
languages. “Of real inflections (in the Schlegelian sense) Bopp now recognizes only
certain vowel-changes and the reduplication.”
3.
In his
Comparative Grammar (1833), Bopp, breaking completely
with Schlegel, commits himself to the “agglutinative” theory, according
to which all words of Indo-European languages are derived from monosyllabic roots, which are
either
verbal or
pronominal; the forms of
inflection arise entirely from the combination of different roots, of which, in each
combination, all but one have assumed a purely subordinate and modifying character. A curious
symbolic principle is also advanced by him (e. g. the feminine forms
are “fuller and rounder”), and a
mechanical
principle of balance, regulating the “weight” of syllables. Bopp speaks
often of “physical laws” (which are nowadays called “phonetic
laws”), and draws frequent metaphors from the natural sciences. Of great
significance for his linguistic views are also his frequent personification of language, and
the persistence with which he speaks only of its
decay, of
deterioration from an earlier stage of perfection, and not of its simultaneous
growth.
Bopp's discoveries resulted less from any strictly scientific method of investigation
instituted by him than from his remarkable genius, and it can therefore hardly be said that
he founded a school. Though his discoveries needed much supplementing in detail (which they
received in very great measure through the learning and genius of Pott); though his inclusion
of the Malay-Polynesian languages in the Indo-European group has been entirely rejected by
later scholars; and though his
Comparative Grammar has been superseded by
later works; yet the foundations of comparative philology are still in the main as he
constructed them; and but for him linguistic students might still be building upon sand, as
they built, and could not but build, ere his day.
The most recent and extensive work concerning Bopp is S. Lefmann's
Franz Bopp:
sein Leben und seine Wissenschaft (vol. i., Berlin, 1891), containing in a
voluminous appendix Bopp's correspondence, never before published, with Windischmann, De
Sacy, and other scholars of note. The best characterization of Bopp's scientific position is,
however, still to be found in Delbrück's
Introduction to the Study of
Language (English translation by Miss Channing, Leipzig, 1884), from which
the above sketch is largely taken. See also an article by Kuhn A. in
Unsere
Zeit, 1868; and one by Brugmann and Streitberg, forming an Introduction to vol. i.
(1891-92) of their new periodical,
Indogermanische Forschungen.
The same volume also contains a notice of Lefmann's book.
