Lectures on the Science of Language 2 Volume Set: Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1861 and 1863

by F. Max Müller

Born in Germany and trained in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, Friedrich Max M�ller (1823-1900) settled at Oxford, where he would become the university's first professor of comparative philology. Best known for his work on the Rig Veda, he brought the comparative study of language, mythology and religion to a wider audience in Victorian Britain. His lectures at the Royal Institution, published in two volumes between 1861 and 1864, were reprinted fifteen times before the end of the century. Volume 1 contains the nine 1861 lectures, in which Max M�ller aligns the science of language with the physical sciences. Volume 2 contains the twelve 1863 lectures, in which he argues for the inseparability of the science of language from the science of the mind. Hugely successful at the time - George Eliot was particularly enthused - the lectures remain instructive reading in the history of linguistics.

Genres: Linguistics

1030 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.