The Beginnings of Morphology: Linguistic Botanizing in the 18th Century
Summary
By providing an assured basis in morphology for subsequent phonological comparison Sir William Jones’s celebrated remarks about the resemblance and relationship between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin marked a turning point in the study of language. Some scholars anticipated his conclusions, but their findings appear to have remained largely unknown. At much the same time as the forms of languages were beginning to be compared, investigations were being made in greater detail than hitherto into structural resemblances between different species of plants and animals. In biological studies explicit evolutionary statements based on such observations are few and far between, but in the study of language, similarity of form implied filiation. The present study sets out to compare some of the lines of thought common to comparative linguistics and comparative anatomy, and to suggest that in the biological sciences, too, resemblance implied common origin sooner and more generally than is sometimes held.
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