A Brill Calendar: October 23

Franz Bopp: Linguist Extraordinary

Few inventories enumerating the "march of progress" pay much attention to branches of the humanities 'beyond the Pale' of mass-appeal and fashion.

The general public awe that ‘breakthroughs’ in science & technology create has never been matched by their equivalents in the humanities & linguistics. Through the ages, discovery and invention of material, physical phenomena elicit admiration and fame much more readily; and fame more widely shared.

The case of Franz Bopp, the German linguist who died October 23 1867 in Berlin, at the ripe age of 76, is typical of this disparity. That same year the English physicist Michael Faraday, one of mankind’s heroes, passed away into the halls of everlasting fame. Bopp, however, is remembered only by scholars of the development and evolution of Indo-European languages.

As the professor of Oriental Literature and general philology at the University of Berlin, (a post he held for almost half a century before his death), he substantiated the ‘momentous’ quality of Sanskrit; and in the process enriched the comparative study of mankind’s unique characteristic, to all practical purposes an ageless one: the capability for symbolic speech and discourse.

Sadly enough, it is seldom realized how vitally important the study of languages and literatures has been for emancipating the world’s population from fallacious notions of disconnectedness and unjustifiable feelings of superiority and independence. The dogged determination and great passion with which Bopp produced his massive comparative Grammar of eight different languages in six successive tomes – produced and published from 1833 to 1852 – can stand comparison with Faraday’s discovery of the principle of the electrical motor.