Concepts
Historical Linguistics
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Historical linguistics is the subfield that studies how languages change over time and how related languages descend from a shared ancestor. Sir William Jones's 1786 observation that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin were too closely related to have arisen independently supplied the field's founding insight, and the comparative method that Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm and Franz Bopp developed afterward, together with Grimm's own law describing regular sound correspondences among the Germanic languages, gave it a systematic method for reconstructing those shared ancestors from the languages that survive.
Facts
Proposed Year Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.