Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

My Lectures on the Science of Language are here printed as I had prepared them in manuscript for the Royal Institution. When I came to deliver them, a considerable portion of what I had written had to be omitted, and, in now placing them before the public in a more complete form, I have gladly complied with a wish expressed by many of my hearers. As they are, they only form a short abstract of several Courses delivered from time to time in Oxford, and they do not pretend to be more than an introduction to a science far too comprehensive to be treated successfully in so small a compass. My object, however, will have been attained, if I should succeed in attracting the attention, not only of the scholar, but of the philosopher, the historian, and the theologian, to a science which concerns them all, and which, though it professes to treat of words only, teaches us that there is more in words than is dreamt of in our philosophy.

Comparative linguistics. --- Language and languages.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Born in Germany and trained in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900) settled at Oxford, where he would become the university's first professor of comparative philology. Best known for his work on the Rig Veda, he brought the comparative study of language, mythology and religion to a wider audience in Victorian Britain. His lectures at the Royal Institution, published in two volumes between 1861 and 1864, were reprinted fifteen times before the end of the century. Volume 1 contains the nine 1861 lectures, in which Max Müller aligns the science of language with the physical sciences, breaking his subject down into the three stages that he argues mark the history of any branch of human knowledge: the empirical, the classificatory and the theoretical. Hugely successful at the time - George Eliot was particularly enthused - the lectures remain instructive reading in the history of linguistics.

Linguistics. --- Comparative linguistics. --- Comparative philology --- Philology, Comparative --- Historical linguistics --- Linguistic science --- Science of language --- Language and languages