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Comparative grammar is a branch of linguistics that studies the relationship between two or more languages that share a common ancestor. It is in charge, therefore, of the analysis and comparison of the grammatical structures and elements of these languages.
Comparative grammar: origin and definition
Origin of comparative grammar
Comparative grammar originated at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, when a deep interest arose in Europe in the study of Indo-European languages and their relationship with European languages.
In 1786, the British philologist William Jones (1746-1794) mentioned the relationship between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Persian, and Gothic, a Germanic language, in his Third Anniversary Address to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. From that time on, more research on Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages began.
As a result of the first comparisons between languages, what we know as comparative grammar naturally arose. Mainly, the linguists Rasmus Rask and Franz Bopp are considered as founders of comparative grammar.
Contributions of Rask and Bopp
The Danish linguist Rasmus Rask (1787-1832) stood out for being one of the first to make contributions to comparative grammar. Rask devoted himself to the study of Danish, Latin, Greek, French, German, Germanic, and Persian, and made various comparisons between these languages. His contribution on mutations between Indo-European and Germanic was the beginning of a theory that would later become Grimm’s Law .
Franz Bopp (1791-1867) was a German linguist who specialized in the study of Sanskrit and its connection with other languages. Other earlier linguists had already noted the similarity between Sanskrit and Persian, Greek, Latin and German. One of them was the renowned Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who guessed that Indo-European contained some consonants that did not exist in other non-Indo-European languages.
However, Bopp focused on the origin of the grammatical forms of these languages, something that nobody had done until then. Later, in 1816, he published the results of his research in his book On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit in Comparison with Greek, Latin, Persian, and Germanic , giving rise to comparative grammar.
In 1821, he was appointed professor of Sanskrit and comparative grammar at the University of Berlin. Years later, he published his book Comparative Grammar with the aim of investigating and describing the origin of grammatical structures by comparing various languages, as well as tracing their phonetic laws. Bopp was also one of the most important authors to describe the foundations of Indo-European grammar.
Other contributions
Other German linguists also made contributions to comparative grammar and historical linguistics. Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) made one of the first classifications of language types; Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) identified the phonetic mutations of the Indo-European and Germanic consonants; and August Schleicher (1821-1868) created a language classification system similar to family trees.
Definition and object of study of comparative grammar
Grammar is a part of linguistics that is responsible for studying the elements of a language, its organization and other characteristics, and also establishing the relationship between two or more languages.
Comparative grammar is a discipline that studies the elements of more than one language in order to make a comparison between them. It not only analyzes their similarities and differences, but also identifies the relationships that exist between them by comparing their components, their phonetics, and their meaning.
Comparative grammar can be defined as a descriptive and diachronic grammar, that is, it examines and describes the elements that constitute languages and observes their changes and evolution over time. Likewise, its object of study focuses on the origin and investigation of these changes. Unlike historical grammar, however, his approach is based on comparison, and not on the history of a language’s evolution.
Generally, comparative grammar establishes comparisons between two or more languages that have, in turn, a language in common. That is, an ancestor from which they originated. But in order to make this comparison, comparative grammar performs an exhaustive study of each language.
Comparative grammar also includes the study of the principles and uses of a language, its morphology, its description and the “cognates”. In linguistics, cognates are terms that are considered consanguineous, that is, words that share a similar or close etymology.
For this, comparative grammar uses research methods that are based on the comparison of the phonological and morphological systems, the syntax and the lexicon of two or more languages.
Comparative grammar today
There are currently different theoretical frameworks in modern linguistics which, therefore, also influence comparative grammar studies.
Based on the theories developed by the American linguist Noam Chomsky since 1965, comparative grammar presents a broader and more universal approach, recognizing the innate capacity of the mind to acquire a language and establishing the relationship between all languages, not just those that they have a common ancestor.
Based on the syntactic models that Chomsky published in his works Syntactic Structures , Standard Theory and Extended Standard Theory , as well as the Minimalist Program , contemporary grammar has a greater theoretical framework for the study of a language, from its acquisition to linguistic constructions. This is useful not only to explain language phenomena, but also to understand their origin and make a more accurate and complete comparison.
Bibliography
- RAE. Dictionary of the Spanish language . Rae.es. Available at https://dle.rae.es/gram%C3%A1tico#JQukZIX
- From Andrés Días, R. Comparative grammar of Iberian languages. (2013). Spain. Trea Editions.
- Commelerán and Gómez, F. Comparative grammar of the Castilian and Latin languages. (2018). Spain. Wentworth Press.
