J. GRIMM’S PLACE IN THE CLG AND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY LINGUISTIC

Abstract

In the Course in General Linguistics (1916), F. de Saussure occasionally makes explicit references to the first German linguistics, especially to Franz Bopp, responsible for the publication, in 1816, of the work considered the foundational book of the linguistic studies as such, in which relations of kinship between European and Asiatic languages ??were demonstrated. Jacob Grimm, who is credited with discovering the first “phonetic law”, however, is mentioned only in two moments, in one of which critically by the confusion between letter and sound present in his work. However, Grimm’s important discovery of the consonantal mutation noticed in the Gothic in relation to Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin was the basis upon which the linguists of the last quarter of the nineteenth century relied on their redirection from linguistic studies to phonetics and to “living languages”. This work seeks to discuss  the importance of Grimm’s work in the advent of Indo-European Linguistics and to demonstrate the repercussion of the German author’s discovery in establishing the discipline in his time and on the subsequent authors,  including Saussure, highlighting the separation between synchronic and diachronic studies, despite the few references to the German author in CLG, which would suggest a small contribution on his part to the scientific study of language. This is a bibliographical research, based on Auroux et al. (2000), Campbell (1999), Morpurgo Davies (1998; 2004) and Saussure (2012 [1916]).