Background
He was born Sept. 14, 1791, in Mainz.
He was born Sept. 14, 1791, in Mainz.
He educated at Aschaffenburg. In 1812 he went to Paris, where he studied Oriental languages.
In 1816 wrote his first monograph, on the verbal system of the Indo-European languages. He continued his study of Sanskrit language and literature in London, where he met the famous philologist and diplomat, Wilhelm von Humboldt. In the Annals of Oriental Literature (1820) he published his "Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic Languages Showing the Original Identity of Their Grammatical Structure." Bopp received an honorary doctorate from the University of Göttingen.Gottingen. Then at Humboldt's recommendation in 1821 he was appointed professor of Oriental literature and general philology at the University of Berlin, where he taught until 1864. His main work, a comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages, which was also soon translated into English and French, appeared in six parts between 1833 and 1852. He died in Berlin Oct. 23, 1867.
Bopp's numerous Sanskrit studies include editions and translations of manuscripts, glossaries, and several grammars. His great importance in the history of linguistic scholarship lies in his comparative studies. He was not the very first scholar to see the relationship between the various Indo-European languages but no one before him had analyzed and compared the similarities in their morphological structures. The Indo-European inflected forms he viewed as composed of original monosyllabic roots. He assumed that among sounds "physical laws" sometimes operated without exceptions. Later Bopp's ideas were developed and improved upon by German scholars like A. F. Pott, August Schleicher, August Leskien, Karl Brugmann, and Hermann Osthoff. These men also established in detail the phonological characteristics of the Indo-European ancestral language, the sound-correspondences of individual languages, and the regularity of all sound-change. Bopp increasingly included more and more Indo-European languages in his comparative treatment, e.g., the Celtic languages (1839) and Albanian (1854). He also attempted to establish a relationship between Indo-European and the Malayo-Polynesian and the Caucasian languages.