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Article published In: Historiographia Linguistica
Vol. 1:3 (1974) ► pp.313–339

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The Beginnings of Morphology

Linguistic Botanizing in the 18th Century

 | University of Edinburgh
Published online: 1 January 1974
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https://doi.org/10.1075/hl.1.3.04sal
Summary
By providing an assured basis in morphology for subsequent phonological comparison Sir William Jones’s celebrated remarks about the resemblance and relationship between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin marked a turning point in the study of language. Some scholars anticipated his conclusions, but their findings appear to have remained largely unknown. At much the same time as the forms of languages were beginning to be compared, investigations were being made in greater detail than hitherto into structural resemblances between different species of plants and animals. In biological studies explicit evolutionary statements based on such observations are few and far between, but in the study of language, similarity of form implied filiation. The present study sets out to compare some of the lines of thought common to comparative linguistics and comparative anatomy, and to suggest that in the biological sciences, too, resemblance implied common origin sooner and more generally than is sometimes held.
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Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Kistner, Kelly
2014. A Dictionary without Definitions: Romanticist Science in the Production and Presentation of the Grimm Brothers’ German Dictionary, 1838–1863. Science in Context 27:4 ► pp. 683 ff. DOI logo
Joseph, John E.
1996. ‘Undoubtedly a powerful influence’: Victor Henry's Antinomies linguistiques (1896), with an annotated translation of the first chapter. Language & Communication 16:2 ► pp. 117 ff. DOI logo
Picardi, Eva
1977. Some Problems of Classification in Linguistics and Biology, 1800–1830. Historiographia Linguistica 4:1 ► pp. 31 ff. DOI logo

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