Rus va ingliz tillari kafedrasi roman-german filologiyasiga kirish

Undersagelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse (In- 
vestigation on the Origin of Old Norse or Icelandic (1818) may be called a 
comparative Indo-European Grammar. In this book Rask clearly demonstrated the 
significance of laws of sounds as a proof of linguistic kinship, although he added that 
they were especially convincing when supported by grammatical similarities. Thus, 
in Rask we find the whole kernel from which modern linguistic comparative methods 
have been developed. 

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50 
Rask introduced the idea that the comparison not only of inflectional systems, 
but also of phonetic characteristics, constituted a scientific approach to the 
examination of linguistic relationships; in other words, when properly examined, 
phonetics could provide clues as well as grammar. 
Rask examined all the languages bordering geographically on Norse to 
discover whether they were related, and where he found a relationship he followed it 
up. He was the first to recognize the relationship between the languages now called 
Germanic. The scheme of genetic relations between these languages which Rask 
drew up was quite correct. 
Rask's great merit was not merely that his scheme of linguistic relationships 
was correct, but that his reasoning in substantiating them was soundly based. He was 
quite right to state in his book that in the comparison of languages the grammatical 
side should never be forgotten, for the coincidence of words was extremely 
unreliable. 
Even without the use of Sanskrit, Rask hit upon the two sound shifts in the 
history of the Germanic languages. It should be added that he did not see the 
complete regularity of the development of sounds. For example, he did not look for 
the reasons for the exceptions to his main rules. It remained for later generations of 
linguists to make discoveries that introduced a new conception of regularity and 
"law" into the evolution of sounds. 
It was spokesmen for the German linguistic tendency called the Young 
Grammarians who insisted in the 1880's on the remarkable regularity of sound- 
changes and proclaimed the principle that phonetic laws admit of no exceptions. If 
the law did not operate in some instances, they said, this was because they had been 
broken by analogy, e.g. by resemblances of sound or meaning which join different 
words together in the speaker's mind. The Young Grammarians believed that these 
blind fatalistic sound laws were purely destructive, breaking the systematic structure 
of a language until the irregularities caused by them had to be remedied by analogous 
formations. The two concepts of sound laws and analogy were considered enough to 
explain practically everything in the development of language. 
Some years later objections were raised to inviolable sound laws theory, and 
linguistic facts made students admit the existence of other circumstances which made 
these sound laws more flexible. Exceptions to the rules were explained with reference 
to hitherto unsuspected determining factors. (See Verner's Law below.) 
For example, we find in Modern English f as the representative of Middle 
English f in such words as fox, foot, and full. But in the word vixen-"female fox"-we 
find v instead of f. Does this refute the theory of regular phonetic change? No, it does 
not if we find another explanation for the v in vixen, which is that vixen, is borrowed 
from a dialect of Southern English speech in which f regularly became v. 

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51 
Phonetic formulae testifying to the close connection between Indo-European 
languages are based upon close observation of phonetic relations, and there are 
regular sets of phonetic, morphological, and syntactical laws. For instance, in the 
field of phonetics comparison shows the following law: Indo-European p corresponds 
to Greek p, Latin p, Lithuanian p, and Armenian h or w. In Armenian, h appears 
where in Greek we find p: the Greek pyr "fire" is hur in AFmenian; the Greek pater 
is hair in Armenian. 
Changes like these may show the evolution of a single, or of a combination of 
sounds, from the earliest available records down to the latest innovations. 
One important figure in the development of comparative linguistics as a 
science is the German scholar Franz Bopp, (1791-1867) who wrote a book, Uber das