As noted in this feature’s overview article, Bopp’s 1816 work appeared in print before either Rask’s or Grimm’s. So when, and how, did Bopp himself learn of Grimm’s work? The answer is recorded in a footnote to the preface.
A near-miss, recorded in a footnote
Looking back on reworking his 1816 book into an English version in 1820, Bopp adds this:
Grimms meisterhafte deutsche Grammatik war mir leider bei Abfassung der englischen Umarbeitung noch nicht bekannt geworden, und ich konnte damals für die altgermanischen Dialekte nur Hickes und Fulda benutzen. (Grimm’s masterly German grammar had, unfortunately, not yet become known to me when I composed that English reworking, and at the time I could use only Hickes and Fulda for the Old Germanic dialects.)
As of 1820, Bopp still didn’t know Grimm’s work. The two men were tackling the same problem, in the same era, from separate places, entirely unaware of each other. The lesson read in the Rask feature — that credit doesn’t always stay with whoever found something first — repeats here in a different shape. Bopp, Rask, and Grimm each knew the others’ work to a different degree at any given moment; the discipline of comparative linguistics was built out of that tangled, uneven web of who had read whom.
What the metaphor grew into — and overgrew into
The idea that “language is an organism” lived on in comparative linguistics long after Bopp’s own generation. But its growth had a shadow side too. The linguist August Schleicher, who died the year after Bopp, pushed this metaphor further still, building a “family tree theory” that described relationships between languages in the literal vocabulary of evolutionary biology, as if languages were biological species. There’s actually a wide gap between comparing language to “a living thing” as metaphor, and treating language change as, literally, a process of biological evolution. Once that gap was crossed, later generations went on to convert value judgments about a language’s “health” or “degeneration” into judgments about the superiority or inferiority of particular peoples and languages — the problems read in the Max Müller feature and the Otto Jespersen feature trace back, at root, to the same soil.
Even Bopp’s own preface shows a trace of his era’s particular bias. He describes the Semitic language family as having “a coarser nature” (derberen Natur), set against the “rich endowment” of the Indo-European family. Describing a difference in grammatical type as a ranking of superiority — this habit wasn’t Bopp’s alone; it’s only honest to record that it was an assumption soaked into nineteenth-century comparative linguistics as a whole.
Summary
| Point | Content |
|---|---|
| The relationship to Grimm | A footnote confirms the two men still didn’t know each other’s work as of 1820 |
| What the metaphor produced | “Language is an organism” supported fruitful analysis, including the theory of endings as fossils |
| The shadow it produced | Schleicher and others pushed the metaphor into literal evolutionary theory |
| A remaining problem | Describing Semitic as “coarser” reflects a nineteenth-century bias toward ranking language types, visible in Bopp’s own writing |
In a nutshell — Bopp, Rask, and Grimm climbed separate slopes of the same mountain, each unaware of the others. And the powerful metaphor Bopp wielded — “language is a living thing” — produced rich discoveries, while also growing, in the next generation’s hands, in a far more dangerous direction.