ABSTRACT
Developed in the nineteenth century as an independent linguistic discipline with the goal of reconstructing the origins, developmental history, and relationships of and between individual languages on the basis of comparative studies ( reconstruction). It can be stated that comparative linguistics was born in Germany during the ‘Romantic period,’ in which both the study of the history of the Europeans as well as of Sanskrit were pursued. This period is associated primarily with the names of F.V.Schlegel, F. Bopp, R.Rask, J.Grimm, and A.Schleicher, each of whom studied the genetic relationships between the Germanic languages and other Indo-European languages throughout their recorded history. Based on a thorough description of the most important Indo-European languages, as undertaken by Bopp and Grimm, Schleicher attempted to derive all such languages from a reconstructed Indo-European proto-language; the genetic relationships that were uncovered were represented in the form of a genetic ‘family tree’ ( genetic tree theory). Through the so-called Neogrammarians the historical view of language became the primary, indeed for a while almost exclusive, direction of linguistic studies (see Paul 1880, and the over-views in Bragmann and Delbrück 1886-1900; Hirt 1921-37; Meillet 1903; and others).
