11 Facts About Franz Bopp

Franz Bopp spent five years of laborious study, almost living in the libraries of Paris and unmoved by the turmoils that agitated the world around him, including Napoleon's escape, the Waterloo campaign and the Restoration.

Franz Bopp's task was not to point out the similarity of Sanskrit with Persian, Greek, Latin or German, for previous scholars had long established that, but he aimed to trace the postulated common origin of the languages' grammatical forms, of their inflections from composition.

Franz Bopp became friends with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian ambassador at the Court of St James's, to whom he taught Sanskrit.

Franz Bopp became a member of the Royal Prussian Academy the following year.

Franz Bopp started work on a new edition in Latin, for the following year, completed in 1832; a shorter grammar appeared in 1834.

How carefully Franz Bopp matured this work emerges from the series of monographs printed in the Transactions of the Berlin Academy, which preceded it.

Franz Bopp is the first philologist to prove Albanian as a separate branch of Indo-European.

Franz Bopp was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855 and an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 1863.

Critics have charged Franz Bopp with neglecting the study of the native Sanskrit grammars, but in those early days of Sanskrit studies, the great libraries of Europe did not hold the requisite materials; if they had, those materials would have demanded his full attention for years, and such grammars as those of Charles Wilkins and Henry Thomas Colebrooke, from which Franz Bopp derived his grammatical knowledge, had all used native grammars as a basis.

Franz Bopp lived to see the results of his labours everywhere accepted, and his name justly celebrated.

English scholar Russell Martineau, who had studied under Franz Bopp, gave the following tribute:.