| The comparative method developed out of attempts to reconstruct the proto-language mentioned by Jones, which he did not name but subsequent linguists have labelled Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The first professional comparison between the Indo-European languages that were then known was made by the German linguist Franz Bopp in 1816. He did not attempt a reconstruction but demonstrated that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit shared a common structure and a common lexicon.[18] In 1808, Friedrich Schlegel first stated the importance of using the eldest possible form of a language when trying to prove its relationships;[19] in 1818, Rasmus Christian Rask developed the principle of regular sound-changes to explain his observations of similarities between individual words in the Germanic languages and their cognates in Greek and Latin.[20] Jacob Grimm, better known for his Fairy Tales, used the comparative method in Deutsche Grammatik (published 1819–1837 in four volumes), which attempted to show the development of the Germanic languages from a common origin, which was the first systematic study of diachronic language change.[21] Both Rask and Grimm were unable to explain apparent exceptions to the sound laws that they had discovered. Although Hermann Grassmann explained one of the anomalies with the publication of Grassmann's law in 1862,[22] Karl Verner made a methodological breakthrough in 1875, when he identified a pattern now known as Verner's law, the first sound-law based on comparative evidence showing that a phonological change in one phoneme could depend on other factors within the same word (such as neighbouring phonemes and the position of the |
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