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Antoine Meillet
Overview
Paul Jules Antoine Meillet (French: [ɑ̃twan mɛjɛ]; 11 November 1866 – 21 September 1936) was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. He began his studies at the Sorbonne University, where he was influenced by Michel Bréal, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and the members of the L'Année sociologique. In 1890 he was part of a research trip to the Caucasus, where he studied the Armenian language. After his return, de Saussure had gone back to Geneva, so Meillet continued the series of lectures on comparative linguistics that de Saussure had given.
In 1897 Meillet completed his doctorate, Research on the Use of the Genitive-Accusative in Old Slavonic. In 1902 he took a chair in Armenian at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales and took under his wing Hrachia Adjarian, who would become the founder of modern Armenian dialectology. In 1905 Meillet was elected to the Collège de France, where he taught on the history and structure of Indo-European languages. One of his most-quoted statements is that "anyone wishing to hear how Indo-Europeans spoke should come and listen to a Lithuanian peasant." He worked closely with linguists Paul Pelliot and Robert Gauthiot.
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.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
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These languages consist of monosyllabic words which follow one another in direct succession without any intermediate inflectional elements to modify their meaning. Philologists usually call such languages 'root-languages,' because a sound complex that carries the essential meaning of a word, apart from all modifying elements, is called by their science a verbal root.
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Antoine Meillet is.
What is called "modern ideas," or "the ideas of the eighteenth century," or "French ideas"--that, consequently, against which the GERMAN mind rose up with profound disgust--is of English origin, there is no doubt about it. The French were only the apes and actors of these ideas, their best soldiers, and likewise, alas!
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
States what Antoine Meillet is.
The same diffusion over the Earth’s surface which has led to the differentiation of the race, has simultaneously led to a differentiation of their speech: a truth which we see further illustrated in each nation by the peculiarities of dialect found in separate districts. Thus the progress of Language conforms to the general law, alike in the evolution of languages, in the evolution of families of words, and in the…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
Close in meaning to Antoine Meillet; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
- Ferdinand de Saussure
- Geneva
- Indo-European languages
- Harvard University
- Philology
- Switzerland
- Serbo-Croatian
- Collège de France
- Umberto Eco
- Caucasus
- Georges Dumézil
- Émile Benveniste
- University of Paris
- Esperanto
Place in the tradition
Part of Structuralism.