How languages change and how relatedness is proved.
10 topics · 19 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus
William Jones · 1786
Observes that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin share grammatical structure too systematic for coincidence and proposes they descend from a common source…
+3 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Language and the Study of Language: Twelve Lectures on the Principles of Linguistic Science
William Dwight Whitney · 1867
Works through sound change, analogy and borrowing as the forces of language change, and the comparative method by which related languages are shown…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache
Franz Bopp · 1816
Compares the verb conjugation systems of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic and argues their systematic correspondences prove common…
+10 more at this level
12 of 19 works
William Jones
Observes that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin share grammatical structure too systematic for coincidence and proposes they descend from a common source language now lost, the founding observation of Indo-European studies.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Isaac Taylor
Argues that place names fossilise successive layers of settlement and conquest, so reading their etymology carefully recovers population movements that have left no other historical trace.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Otto Jespersen
Argues that English's vocabulary and even parts of its grammar were reshaped less by internal drift than by successive waves of contact with Norse, French and Latin, and treats borrowing as a normal engine of language change.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Edward Sapir
Argues that languages can be classified by the formal type of structure they use to build words and sentences, independent of whether they are historically related.
about 5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026William Dwight Whitney
Works through sound change, analogy and borrowing as the forces of language change, and the comparative method by which related languages are shown to descend from a common ancestor — an early statement of the toolkit historical linguistics is still built on.
Walter W. Skeat
Traces the documented history of the English word-stock word by word, insisting each etymology be supported by dated citations rather than the plausible-sounding guesswork that had dominated earlier dictionaries.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David W. Anthony
Argues from horse domestication, wheeled-vehicle and burial evidence that Proto-Indo-European was spoken by pastoralists on the Pontic-Caspian steppe and spread with their technology, against the rival theory that it spread with the first farmers from Anatolia.
Christian Lehmann
Sets out the parameters — such as paradigmaticity, bondedness and obligatoriness — by which the grammaticalisation of a lexical item into a grammatical marker can be measured, arguing that these track recurrent, largely unidirectional paths from concrete lexical meaning to abstract grammatical function.
Franz Bopp
Compares the verb conjugation systems of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic and argues their systematic correspondences prove common descent, founding comparative grammar as a discipline distinct from etymological speculation.
August Schleicher
Systematises the comparative method into a family-tree model of Indo-European and reconstructs proto-forms marked with an asterisk, establishing both the technique and the notation later comparative linguistics inherited.
Karl Verner
Shows that the apparent exceptions to Grimm's Law depended on where stress fell in the original Proto-Indo-European word, resolving them as a further regular sound change rather than a failure of the law's regularity.
Hermann Paul
Argues that sound change proceeds mechanically and without exception within a dialect at a given time, so apparent exceptions must be explained by analogy or borrowing rather than by weakening the regularity of the sound law itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026