ABSTRACT
When Bopp and his successors began their work in comparative Indo-European linguistics, morphology was well understood. The classical languages were thoroughly mastered on the basis of handbooks that included nominal and verbal paradigms as well as descriptions of uninflected parts of speech. Sanskrit grammars provided a clear pattern for portrayal of a somewhat more complex set of verbal forms than either Greek or Latin. And concern since the time of Leibniz with all known languages provided information on types of morphology and categories, as its characterizations brought to their high point in Adelung's Mithridates may illustrate.
