Meillet
Paul Jules Antoine Meillet (; 11 November 1866 Moulins, France – 21 September 1936 Châteaumeillant, France) was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. He began his studies at the Sorbonne University, where he was influenced by Michel Bréal, Ferdinand de Saussure and the members of the '' L'Année Sociologique''. In 1890, he was part of a research trip to the Caucasus, where he studied the Armenian language. After his return, de Saussure had gone back to Geneva so he continued the series of lectures on comparative linguistics that the Swiss linguist had given. Meillet completed his doctorate, ''Research on the Use of the Genitive-Accusative in Old Slavonic'', in 1897. In 1902, he took a chair in Armenian at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales and took under his wing Hrachia Adjarian, who would become the founder of modern Armenian dialectology. In 1905, he was elected to the Collège de France, where he taught on the hist ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Georges Dumézil
Georges Edmond Raoul Dumézil (4 March 189811 October 1986) was a French philologist, linguist, and religious studies scholar who specialized in comparative linguistics and mythology. He was a professor at Istanbul University, École pratique des hautes études and the Collège de France, and a member of the Académie Française. Dumézil is well known for his formulation of the trifunctional hypothesis on Proto-Indo-European mythology and society. His research has had a major influence on the fields of comparative mythology and Indo-European studies. Early life and education Georges Dumézil was born in Paris, France, on 4 March 1898, the son of Jean Anatole Jean Dumézil and Marguerite Dutier. His father was a highly educated general in the French Army. Dumézil received an elite education in Paris at the Collège de Neufchâteau, Lycée de Troyes, Lycée Louis-le-Grand and Lycée de Tarbes. He came to master Ancient Greek and Latin at an early age. Through the influence of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Hrachia Adjarian
Hrachia Acharian ( hy, Հրաչեայ Աճառեան, reformed spelling: Հրաչյա Աճառյան ; 8 March 1876 – 16 April 1953) was an Armenian linguist, lexicographer, etymologist, and philologist. An Istanbul Armenian, Acharian studied at local Armenian schools and at the Sorbonne, under Antoine Meillet, and the University of Strasbourg, under Heinrich Hübschmann. He then taught in various Armenian communities in the Russian Empire and Iran before settling in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1923, working at Yerevan State University until his death. A distinguished polyglot, Acharian compiled several major dictionaries, including the monumental ''Armenian Etymological Dictionary'', extensively studied Armenian dialects, compiled catalogs of Armenian manuscripts, and authored comprehensive studies on the history of Armenian language and alphabet. Acharian is considered the father of Armenian linguistics. Life Acharian was born to Armenian parents in Const ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Indo-European Languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; and another nine subdivisions that are now extinct. Today, the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are English, Hindi–Urdu, Spanish, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, German, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million native speakers; many others are small and in danger of extinction. In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Meillet's Law
Meillet's law is a Common Slavic accent law, named after the French Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, who discovered it. Overview According to the law, Slavic words have a circumflex on the root vowel (i.e., the first syllable of a word), if that word had a mobile accent paradigm in Proto-Slavic and Proto-Balto-Slavic, regardless of whether the root had the Balto-Slavic acute register. Compare: * acute on Lithuanian ''gálvą'', accusative singular of mobile-paradigm '' galvà'' 'head', vs. circumflex in Slavic (Serbo-Croatian '' glȃvu'', Slovenian '' glavô'', Russian '' gólovu'') * acute on Lithuanian '' sū́nų'', accusative singular of mobile-paradigm ''sūnùs'' 'son', versus circumflex in Slavic (Serbo-Croatian '' sȋna'', Slovenian '' sȋnu'') Meillet's law should most probably be interpreted as polarization of accentual mobility in Slavic, due to which accent in the words with mobile accentuation had to be on the first ''mora'', instead on the first syllable (in place ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ferdinand De Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure (; ; 26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders (together with Charles Sanders Peirce) of semiotics, or ''semiology'', as Saussure called it. One of his translators, Roy Harris, summarized Saussure's contribution to linguistics and the study of "the whole range of human sciences. It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology and anthropology." Although they have undergone extension and critique over time, the dimensions of organization introduced by Saussure continue to inform contemporary approaches to the phenomenon of language. As Leonard Bloomfield stated after reviewing the ''Cours'': "he has given us the theoretical basis for a science of human s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Milman Parry
Milman Parry (June 23, 1902 – December 3, 1935) was an American Classicist whose theories on the origin of Homer's works have revolutionized Homeric studies to such a fundamental degree that he has been described as the "Charles Darwin, Darwin of Homeric studies". In addition, he was a pioneer in the discipline of oral tradition. Early life and education Parry was born in 1902 in Oakland, California. He grew up in a house full of books, with a father who was self-taught and widely read. He and his siblings often recited poems from memory as a game. He graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1919, and studied at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A. and M.A.) where he became proficient in ancient Greek and the Classics. He then studied for a PhD at the University of Paris, Sorbonne in Paris and was a student of the linguist Antoine Meillet. In his dissertations, which were published in French in 1928, Parry demonstrated that the Homeric style is characteri ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Armenian Language
Armenian ( classical: , reformed: , , ) is an Indo-European language and an independent branch of that family of languages. It is the official language of Armenia. Historically spoken in the Armenian Highlands, today Armenian is widely spoken throughout the Armenian diaspora. Armenian is written in its own writing system, the Armenian alphabet, introduced in 405 AD by the priest Mesrop Mashtots. The total number of Armenian speakers worldwide is estimated between 5 and 7 million. History Classification and origins Armenian is an independent branch of the Indo-European languages. It is of interest to linguists for its distinctive phonological changes within that family. Armenian exhibits more satemization than centumization, although it is not classified as belonging to either of these subgroups. Some linguists tentatively conclude that Armenian, Greek (and Phrygian) and Indo-Iranian were dialectally close to each other;''Handbook of Formal Languages'' (1997p. 6 wit ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Marcel Cohen
Marcel Samuel Raphaël Cohen (February 6, 1884 – November 5, 1974) was a French linguist. He was an important scholar of Semitic languages and especially of Ethiopian languages. He studied the French language and contributed much to general linguistics. Life Marcel Cohen was born in Paris. He studied at the Lycée Condorcet. He attended Antoine Meillet's lectures at the Collège de France and the École pratique des hautes études. In 1905 he registered at the École des langues orientales and graduated in 1909. He Studied Amharic (under Mondon-Vidailhet), French linguistics, Sanskrit, Ge'ez and South Arabian. He wrote his thesis on the Arabic dialect of the Jews of Algiers (''Le parler arabe des juifs d'Alger'').See Strelcyn 1975, p. 615. Between March 1910 and June 1911, he undertook a journey to Ethiopia in which he collected much material on Ethiopian languages.An account of this journey was written by him under the title: ''Rapport sur une mission linguistique en Aby ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Émile Benveniste
Émile Benveniste (; 27 May 1902 – 3 October 1976) was a French structural linguist and semiotician. He is best known for his work on Indo-European languages and his critical reformulation of the linguistic paradigm established by Ferdinand de Saussure. Biography Benveniste was born in Aleppo, Aleppo Vilayet, Ottoman Syria to a Sephardi family. His father sent him to Paris to undertake rabbinical studies, but he left the Rabbinical School after receiving his baccalauréat, and enrolled in the École pratique des hautes études. There he studied under Antoine Meillet, a former student of Saussure, and Joseph Vendryes, completing his degree in 1920. He would return to the École pratique des hautes études in 1927 as a director of studies, and would receive his doctorate there in 1935, with his major thesis on the formation of noun roots, and his secondary thesis on the Avestan infinitive. Following Meillet's death in 1936, he was elected to the Chair of Comparative Grammar in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Aurélien Sauvageot
Aurélien Sauvageot (1897–1988) was a French linguist. He was specialised in Finno-Ugric languages. Biography Sauvageot was born in Constantinople, as his father was an engineer working in the service of the Ottoman Sultan. In 1918, Sauvageot was admitted at the École Normale Supérieure and started studying Germanic languages. Sauvageot's teachers, most prominent among them Antoine Meillet, pushed him towards finno-ugric linguistics as the professorship for it was vacant since philologist Robert Gauthiot had been killed in the First World War. Sauvageot traveled to Uppsala in Sweden where he started learning Finnish, then moved to Finland in June 1919, and stayed there until October. In 1923, he moved to Hungary to teach French at the Eötvös József Collegium in Budapest. He remained there until 1929, then moved back to France and completed his doctoral thesis on the lexicon of Uralo-Altaic languages,The Uralo-Altaic family was a hypothesis about a relationship be ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Lucien Tesnière
Lucien Tesnière (; May 13, 1893 – December 6, 1954) was a prominent and influential French linguist. He was born in Mont-Saint-Aignan on May 13, 1893. As a maître de conférences (senior lecturer) in University of Strasbourg (1924), and later professor in University of Montpellier (1937), he published many papers and books on Slavic languages. However, his importance in the history of linguistics is based mainly on his development of an approach to the syntax of natural languages that would become known as dependency grammar. He presented his theory in his book ''Éléments de syntaxe structurale'' (Elements of Structural Syntax), published posthumously in 1959. In the book he proposes a sophisticated formalization of syntactic structures, supported by many examples from a diversity of languages. Tesnière died in Montpellier on December 6, 1954. Many central concepts that the modern study of syntax takes for granted were developed and presented in ''Éléments''. For ins ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Michel Bréal
Michel Jules Alfred Bréal (; 26 March 183225 November 1915), French philologist, was born at Landau in Rhenish Palatinate. He is often identified as a founder of modern semantics. Life and career Michel Bréal was born at Landau in Germany of French-Jewish parents.Michel Bréal (1832–1915), A forgotten precursor of enunciation and subjectivity Arnaud Fournet After studying at Wissembourg, Metz and Paris, he entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1852. In 1857 he went to Berlin, where he studied Sanskrit under Franz Bopp and Albrecht Weber. On his return to France he obtained an appointment in the department of oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Impériale. In 1864 he became professor of comparative grammar at the Collège de France, in 1875 member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, in 1879 ''inspecteur général'' for higher education until the abolition of the office in 1888. In 1890 he was made commander of the Legion of Honour. He resigned ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |