Eintrag

Titel

The earliest stages of Persian-German language comparison

Personen

Toon Van Hal

Jahr

2011

Typ

Aufsatz

Verlag

John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Ort

Amsterdam, Philadelphia

Seiten

147 - 165

In

History of Linguistics 2008. Selected papers from the Eleventh International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences

Sprache(n)

Deutsch
Persisch

Schlagwörter

Historisch
Kontrastiv

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.

https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/bdg/70320