ABSTRACT
A true ‘scientific revolution’, in the root sense as employed by Thomas Kuhn, took place around 1800 when the study of linguistic relations was placed on a new footing. 2 Sir William Jones’s description of Sanskrit led to a tendency to compare European languages, not with the religious Ursprache Hebrew (as had been the tendency before) but with Sanskrit, and paved the way for a phylogeneticcomparative method full of new insights. It made possible, indirectly, the reclassicifation of linguistic variations as resulting from historically specific vowel or consonant shifts, and a systematic and even nomothetic description of such shifts – for instance, Grimm’s famous ‘laws’ of Lautverschiebung.
