Home Linguistics & Semiotics The earliest stages of Persian-German language comparison
Chapter
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

The earliest stages of Persian-German language comparison

  • Toon Van Hal
View more publications by John Benjamins Publishing Company
To Publisher Page
History of Linguistics 2008
This chapter is in the book History of Linguistics 2008

Abstract

Renaissance Europe (re)discovered Persia and its language. Despite the sup­posed Semitic nature of Persian, some striking lexical similarities between this language and the Germanic languages became unmistakable to many Western scho­lars. Until the elaboration of comparative linguistics as an autonomous aca­demic discipline at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dutch (or German) and Persian were often considered to have a privileged relationship, an idea which gave birth to the so-called “Persian-German theory”. This contribution aims to shed new light on the earliest stages of Persian and German vocabulary compari­son carried out by Dutch humanists . The role played by Franciscus Raphelengius (senior), Justus Lipsius, Josephus Justus Scaliger will be re-evaluated. Further­more, Hugo Grotius’s and Marnix van Sint-­Aldegonde’s contribution, which has been largely overlooked in this connection, will be focused upon. The remainder of the paper will discuss the various approaches to the Persian-Germanic hypothesis after its initial formulation.

Abstract

Renaissance Europe (re)discovered Persia and its language. Despite the sup­posed Semitic nature of Persian, some striking lexical similarities between this language and the Germanic languages became unmistakable to many Western scho­lars. Until the elaboration of comparative linguistics as an autonomous aca­demic discipline at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dutch (or German) and Persian were often considered to have a privileged relationship, an idea which gave birth to the so-called “Persian-German theory”. This contribution aims to shed new light on the earliest stages of Persian and German vocabulary compari­son carried out by Dutch humanists . The role played by Franciscus Raphelengius (senior), Justus Lipsius, Josephus Justus Scaliger will be re-evaluated. Further­more, Hugo Grotius’s and Marnix van Sint-­Aldegonde’s contribution, which has been largely overlooked in this connection, will be focused upon. The remainder of the paper will discuss the various approaches to the Persian-Germanic hypothesis after its initial formulation.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements ix
  4. Introduction 1
  5. Part I. Methodological considerations, linguistics and philology
  6. Du Corpus représentatif des grammaires et des traditions linguistiques au Corpus de textes linguistiques fondamentaux 13
  7. The ‘floating’ linguistic sign 25
  8. ‘A term of opprobrium’ 35
  9. Methode als Grenze? 49
  10. Part II. Antiquity
  11. Grammatical doxography in Antiquity 69
  12. Über die Bezeichnung des Indikativs bei den römischen Grammatikern des 1. und 2. Jh. 93
  13. Rewriting the history of the language sciences in classical antiquity 109
  14. Part II. Renaissance linguistics
  15. Elements of a philosophy of language in Claudio Tolomei’s Il Cesano de la lingua Toscana 129
  16. La conception de l’ordre des mots dans la Grammatica Latina de Caspar Finck et Christoph Helwig 135
  17. The earliest stages of Persian-German language comparison 147
  18. Part IV. Seventeenth and eighteenth century
  19. European conceptions of writing from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century 169
  20. Lessons from literary theory 187
  21. Nachahmung und Schöpfung in der Barockgrammatik 201
  22. Leibniz as lexicographer? 217
  23. Du verbe actif au verbe transitif 225
  24. Metaphors in metalinguistic texts 239
  25. Les Méthodes au XVIIe siècle 251
  26. A propos des règles dans les grammaires françaises de l’âge classique 265
  27. La phrase expliquée aux sourds-muets 277
  28. The place of spatial case forms in early Estonian, Latvian and Finnish grammars 289
  29. Part V. Nineteenth and twentieth centuries
  30. Aproximaciones a la enseñanza del análisis 303
  31. A difficult case 317
  32. Relecture jakobsonienne de la distinction saussurienne langue/parole 327
  33. Ernst Cassirer’s and Benedetto Croce’s theories of language in comparison 341
  34. Tradition versus grammatical traditions 359
  35. An early sociolinguistic approach towards standardization and dialect variation 369
  36. Gender and the language scholarship of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in the context of mid twentieth-century American linguistics 389
  37. When categories go back to parts of speech 399
  38. ‘Cultural morphology’ 409
  39. Interjections: An insurmountable problem of structural linguistics? 425
  40. L’espace linguistique en voie de (dé)multiplication 435
  41. Z. S. Harris and the semantic turn of mathematical information theory 449
  42. Name index 459
  43. Subject index 465
https://doi.org/10.1075/sihols.115.15van

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements ix
  4. Introduction 1
  5. Part I. Methodological considerations, linguistics and philology
  6. Du Corpus représentatif des grammaires et des traditions linguistiques au Corpus de textes linguistiques fondamentaux 13
  7. The ‘floating’ linguistic sign 25
  8. ‘A term of opprobrium’ 35
  9. Methode als Grenze? 49
  10. Part II. Antiquity
  11. Grammatical doxography in Antiquity 69
  12. Über die Bezeichnung des Indikativs bei den römischen Grammatikern des 1. und 2. Jh. 93
  13. Rewriting the history of the language sciences in classical antiquity 109
  14. Part II. Renaissance linguistics
  15. Elements of a philosophy of language in Claudio Tolomei’s Il Cesano de la lingua Toscana 129
  16. La conception de l’ordre des mots dans la Grammatica Latina de Caspar Finck et Christoph Helwig 135
  17. The earliest stages of Persian-German language comparison 147
  18. Part IV. Seventeenth and eighteenth century
  19. European conceptions of writing from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century 169
  20. Lessons from literary theory 187
  21. Nachahmung und Schöpfung in der Barockgrammatik 201
  22. Leibniz as lexicographer? 217
  23. Du verbe actif au verbe transitif 225
  24. Metaphors in metalinguistic texts 239
  25. Les Méthodes au XVIIe siècle 251
  26. A propos des règles dans les grammaires françaises de l’âge classique 265
  27. La phrase expliquée aux sourds-muets 277
  28. The place of spatial case forms in early Estonian, Latvian and Finnish grammars 289
  29. Part V. Nineteenth and twentieth centuries
  30. Aproximaciones a la enseñanza del análisis 303
  31. A difficult case 317
  32. Relecture jakobsonienne de la distinction saussurienne langue/parole 327
  33. Ernst Cassirer’s and Benedetto Croce’s theories of language in comparison 341
  34. Tradition versus grammatical traditions 359
  35. An early sociolinguistic approach towards standardization and dialect variation 369
  36. Gender and the language scholarship of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in the context of mid twentieth-century American linguistics 389
  37. When categories go back to parts of speech 399
  38. ‘Cultural morphology’ 409
  39. Interjections: An insurmountable problem of structural linguistics? 425
  40. L’espace linguistique en voie de (dé)multiplication 435
  41. Z. S. Harris and the semantic turn of mathematical information theory 449
  42. Name index 459
  43. Subject index 465
Sign up now to receive a 20% welcome discount
Institutional Access
How does access work?
Have an idea on how to improve our website?
Please write us.
© 2025 De Gruyter Brill
Downloaded on 24.12.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1075/sihols.115.15van/html
Scroll to top button