A pioneering comparative study of the world's languages, first published in 1828.

Jean Chaffanjon (1854 1913) was a natural history teacher in the French colony of Martinique who was commissioned by the French minister of state education and fine arts to explore the Orinoco Delta in Venezuela. The Orinoco had an almost mythical reputation as a source of gold and coffee, and Chaffanjon in 1886 1887 was the first European explorer in the region in almost 100 years. Landing in the city of Guayra, he travelled up two of the continent's largest rivers, the Caura and the Orinoco, documenting the region's geology and his encounters with the indigenous population. His account of...

Edward Morris (1843 1902), Professor of Modern Languages at Melbourne University, contributed material on 'words peculiar to Australia' to the OED. He expanded that research into this dictionary of the English spoken in Australasia, first published in 1898. Morris was able to draw on existing scholarly studies of Maori loan words in the language of settlers in New Zealand, but was the first to give detailed attention to the influence of Australian Aboriginal languages and list early appearances in English of words such as 'cooee' and 'boomerang'. The book also includes English words that...

In 1882 the University of Cambridge accepted a bequest of 5,000 from the writer John Frederick Stanford (1815 1880) for the purpose of creating a dictionary of loan words found in English. This volume, first published in 1892, was the result. Charles Augustus Fennell (1843 1916), a classicist and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge was responsible for selecting the words for inclusion. Following criteria based on Stanford's own notes, the definition of 'anglicised words' is very broad, including words loaned from European languages which entered common use in English after 1470 as well as...

In 1876 the Leipzig publisher Breitkopf und Hartel launched a series on Indo-European languages entitled 'Bibliothek Indogermanischer Grammatiken'. The first three volumes covered phonology, Greek and Sanskrit. This short introduction to the comparative method, published in 1880, was the fourth. It was highly successful, with six editions appearing between 1880 and 1919. Its author, Berthold Delbruck (1842 1922), Professor of Sanskrit at Jena, was a former student of the pioneering Indo-Europeanist Franz Bopp. Delbruck expanded the horizons of the field to cover syntax as well as phonology...

Rudolf von Raumer (1815 76) spent his entire career at the University of Erlangen in Bavaria, working independently of the main linguistic controversies of his time. Realising that historical and comparative phonology needed more precise phonetic concepts and terminology, Raumer proposed many refinements and clarifications in that area. He emphasised both the foundational role of Jacob Grimm's work and the need to progress beyond it; the earliest essay in this volume, dating from 1837, offered fresh insights into Grimm's Law. Raumer also did extensive research on German dialectology and...