Antoine Meillet
Antoine Meillet | |
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Comparative Linguistics, Armenian linguistics, Philology | |
Notable ideas | Epithets in Homer, Meillet's law |
Paul Jules Antoine Meillet (French:
Meillet completed his doctorate, Research on the Use of the Genitive-Accusative in Old Slavonic, in 1897. In 1902, he took a chair in Armenian at the
Today Meillet is remembered as the mentor of an entire generation of linguists and philologists, who would become central to French linguistics in the twentieth century, such as Émile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, and André Martinet.
In 1921, with the help of linguists Paul Boyer and André Mazon , he founded the Revue des études slaves
Historical linguistics
Today, Meillet is known for his contribution to
Homeric studies
At the Sorbonne, from 1924, Meillet supervised Milman Parry. In 1923, a year before Parry began his studies with Meillet, the latter wrote the following (which, in the first of his two French theses, Parry quotes):
Homeric epic is entirely composed of formulae handed down from poet to poet. An examination of any passage will quickly reveal that it is made up of lines and fragments of lines which are reproduced word for word in one or several other passages. Even those lines of which the parts happen not to recur in any other passage have the same formulaic character, and it is doubtless pure chance that they are not attested elsewhere.[4]
Meillet offered the opinion that oral-formulaic composition might be a distinctive feature of orally transmitted epics (which the Iliad was said to be). He suggested to Parry that he observe the mechanics of a living oral tradition to confirm whether that suggestion was valid; he also introduced Parry to the Slovenian scholar Matija Murko, who had written extensively about the heroic epic tradition in Serbo-Croatian and particularly in Bosnia with the help of phonograph recordings.[5] From Parry's resulting research in Bosnia, the records of which are now housed at Harvard University, he and his student Albert Lord revolutionized Homeric scholarship.[6]
Language controversies
Meillet has been accused of meddling politics with his observation of languages. He had negative views on German and especially on Hungarian. Hungarian, he claimed, was too difficult a language full of loanwords and not capable of being a culture bearer (in a way that he claimed other Finno-Ugric languages were unable to become such). His views on Hungarian provoked a critical response from the Hungarian writer Dezső Kosztolányi.[7]
International languages
Meillet supported the use of an international auxiliary language. In his book La Ricerca della Lingua Perfetta nella Cultura Europea ("The Pursuit of the Perfect Language in the Culture of Europe"), Umberto Eco cites Meillet as saying, "Any kind of theoretical discussion is useless, Esperanto is functioning".[8] In addition, Meillet was a consultant with the International Auxiliary Language Association, which presented Interlingua in 1951.[9]
Works
- 1902-05: Études sur l'étymologie et le vocabulaire du vieux slave.[10] Paris, Bouillon.
- 1903: Esquisse d'une grammaire comparée de l'arménien classique.[11]
- 1903: Introduction à l'étude comparative des langues indo-européennes.[12]
- 1908: Les dialectes indo-européens.
- 1913: Aperçu d'une histoire de la langue grecque.
- 1913: Altarmenisches Elementarbuch.
- 1917: Caractères généraux des langues germaniques[13] (rev. edn. 1949)
- 1921: Linguistique historique et linguistique générale.[14]
- 1923: Les origines indo-européennes des mètres grecs.[15]
- 1924: Les langues du monde (co-editor with Marcel Cohen). (Collection linguistique, 16.) Paris: Champion. (2nd edn. 1952)
- 1924: Le slave commun
- 1928: Esquisse d'une histoire de la langue latine.
- 1925: La méthode comparative en linguistique historique (The comparative method in historical linguistics translated by Gordon B. Ford Jr., 1966)
- 1932: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine.
See also
References
- ^ Antoine Meillet (1912). "L'évolution des formes grammaticales". Scientia. 12 (26): 384–400.
- ^ Walter Bisang (2017). "Grammaticalization". Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics: 3.
- ^ Jerzy Kuryłowicz. "The evolution of grammatical categories". Diogenes. 13: 55–71.
- ^ Meillet, Antoine (1923), Les origines indo-européennes des mètres grecs, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, p. 61. Adam Parry's translation, revised.
- ISBN 0-393-05788-7, pp. 186-187.
- ^ Parry, Milman; Parry, Adam (editor) (1971), The making of Homeric verse. The collected papers of Milman Parry, Oxford: Clarendon Press
{{citation}}
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has generic name (help) - ^ Antoine Meillet et les langues de l'Europe : l'affaire hongroise par Jean Perrot - Histoire Épistémologie Langage Année 1988 10-2 pp. 301-318
- World Esperanto Association
- ^ Esterhill, Frank (2000), Interlingua Institute: A History, New York: Interlingua Institute.
- ^ Meillet, Antoine (1866-1936) Auteur du texte (1902–1905). Études sur l'étymologie et le vocabulaire du vieux slave. Partie 2 / par A. Meillet,...
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ Meillet, Antoine (1866-1936) Auteur du texte (1936). Esquisse d'une grammaire comparée de l'arménien classique / par A. Meillet...
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ Meillet, Antoine (1866-1936) Auteur du texte (1903). Introduction à l'étude comparative des langues indo-européennes / A. Meillet,...
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ Meillet, Antoine (1866-1936) Auteur du texte (1926). Caractères généraux des langues germaniques (3e édition revue, corrigée et augmentée) / A. Meillet,...
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ Meillet, Antoine (1866-1936) Auteur du texte (1975). Linguistique historique et linguistique générale ([Reprod. en fac-sim.]) / par A. Meillet,...
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ Meillet, Antoine (1866-1936) Auteur du texte (1923). Les origines indo-européennes des mètres grecs / A. Meillet,...
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
Bibliography
- .
External links
- French Wikisource has original text related to this article: Antoine Meillet