In the opening lines of the preface to Comparative Grammar, Bopp writes out the design of the entire massive work.
What to explain, and what not to
It doesn’t open with the vague statement of ambition so common to weighty books. From its very first sentence, the preface states a concrete scope.
The preface begins:
Ich beabsichtige in diesem Buche eine vergleichende… Beschreibung des Organismus der auf dem Titel genannten Sprachen… und des Ursprungs der die grammatischen Verhältnisse bezeichnenden Formen. (In this book I intend a comparative… description of the organism of the languages named on the title page… and [an investigation] of the origin of the forms that designate grammatical relations.)
Tracing the origin of the “forms” that mark grammatical relationships — that is Bopp’s stated goal, declared plainly in the first sentence. At the opening of a massive work tackling eight languages at once, stating in a single sentence exactly what he’s aiming at is itself one of this preface’s defining traits. But right after that, Bopp deliberately sets a limit on his own inquiry.
Nur das Geheimnis der Wurzeln… lassen wir unangetastet; wir untersuchen nicht, warum z.B. die Wurzel I gehen und nicht stehen… bedeute. (Only the mystery of roots… do we leave untouched; we do not investigate, for instance, why the root I means “to go” and not “to stand”…)
For this example, Bopp deliberately reaches for a concrete pair of roots. The short root I, meaning “go,” and the root STHA (or its contracted form STA), meaning “stand” — why the former carries this sound and the latter that one has, in itself, no explanation. If there is one, Bopp’s position is that it’s nothing more than historical accident. Reaching for a named, concrete root rather than stating only an abstract principle is a habit that repeats throughout this preface.
The value of drawing a line
Why does a given sequence of sounds carry a given meaning? The meaning attached to a root itself is arbitrary, and no reason for it can be found (an intuition close to what Saussure would later theorize as “the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign”). Bopp declares this territory off-limits to his inquiry from the outset — he must have understood that reaching into it risked an endless spiral of unverifiable speculation. But in exchange, he takes on the origin of grammatical forms — endings and affixes — as something that can be explained. The discovery read in another article in this feature — that a verb’s ending traces back to a pronoun — is exactly the work carried out under this declared program. Deciding what to leave as an unsolved mystery, and what to treat as explainable — this initial line is what kept the whole massive project workable.
This line isn’t a mere show of modesty. Extend the explanation all the way to the meaning of roots, and unverifiable speculation would pile up without end — Bopp seems to have foreseen this, and deliberately confined his inquiry within a testable range in advance.
Seen this way, the preface isn’t a formality — it’s the design philosophy of the entire work. Stating up front what falls inside and what falls outside reads almost like a contract with the reader.
Summary
| Point | Content |
|---|---|
| The goal of the inquiry | To explain the origin of the forms (endings, affixes) that mark grammatical relations |
| The territory left untouched | The meaning attached to roots themselves (why a given sound carries a given meaning) |
| The significance of the line | Separating the arbitrary, unexplainable territory from the regular, explainable one, from the very start |
| The work actually carried out | Explaining a verb’s ending as a fossilized pronoun — a concrete result |
In a nutshell — part of what made Bopp’s massive work achievable was that he never claimed to explain everything. Leaving the mystery of roots as a mystery, and aiming only at grammatical forms, is what turned this inquiry into something real. The more ambitious the plan, the more it needs, decided in advance, what it will not attempt — that lesson, too, can be read in these few lines of a preface.