Lectures on the Science of Language

by F. Max Müller

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1885. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... 216 LECTURE V. Grimm's Law. IINTEND to devote to-day's Lecture to the consideration of one phonetic law, which I believe I was the first to call Grimm's Law, a law of great importance and very wide application, affecting nearly the whole consonantal structure of the Aryan languages. The law may be stated as follows: -- There are in the Aryan languages three principal points of consonantal contact, the guttural, the dental, and the labial, k, t, p. At each of these three points there are two modes of utterance, the hard and the soft; each in turn is liable to aspiration, though only in certain languages. In Sanskrit the system is complete; we have the hard checks, k, t, p; the soft checks, g, d, b; the hard aspirated checks, kh, th, ph; and the soft aspirated checks, gh, dh, bh. The soft aspirated checks are, however, in Sanskrit of far greater frequency and importance than the hard aspirates. In Greek we find, besides the usual hard and soft checks, one set of aspirates, %,

Genres: Linguistics

194 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Friedrich Max Müller, K.M. (Ph.D., Philology, Leipzig University, 1843)—generally known as Max Müller or F. Max Müller—was the first Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford University, and an Orientalist who lived and studied in Britain for most of his life. He was one of the founders of the western academic field of Indian studies and the discipline of comparative religion. Müller wrote both scholarly and popular works on the subject of Indology and the Sacred Books of the East, a 50-volume set of English translations, was prepared under his direction.

Müller became a naturalized British citizen in 1855. In 1869, he was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres as a foreign correspondent. He was awarded the Pour le Mérite (civil class) in 1874, and the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art the following year. In 1888, he was appointed Gifford Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, delivering the first in what has proved to be an ongoing, annual series of lectures at several Scottish universities to the present day. He was appointed a member of the Privy Council in 1896.

His wife, Georgina Adelaide Müller was also an author. After Max's death, she deposited his papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.