Article published In:
Historiographia LinguisticaVol. 3:1 (1976) ► pp.1–15
A 17th-Century Demonstration of Language Relationship
Meric Casaubon on English and Greek
In 1650 Meric Casaubon (1599–1671) published a treatise in which he systematically presented rules for demonstrating language relationship; in his study he applied these rules to English and Greek. The explicitness of his theoretical formulations and the examples contained in his practical application of these rules offer a splendid opportunity for pinpointing the causes of the backwardness of historical linguistics in its so-called prescientific period. Careful observation of Casaubon’s presentation shows that it was his formulation of the rules of generally permissible phonetic changes, more than anything else, that prevented him from writing a really good study.
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Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Rhodes, Neil
2015. Pure and Common Greek in Early Tudor England. In The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660, ► pp. 54 ff. 
Metcalf, George J.
1980. Theodor Bibliander (1504–1564) and the Languages of Japheth’s Progeny. Historiographia Linguistica 7:3 ► pp. 323 ff.
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