Karl Brugmann originally intended to include a volume on syntax in his comparative grammar of Indo-European, but as that ambitious project expanded, he and his publisher enlisted Berthold Delbruck (1842 1922) to take on the treatment of syntax. Delbruck's three volumes on inflection and phrase and sentence structure appeared between 1893 and 1900 and remain the fullest treatment of Indo-European syntax to this day. His second volume, published in 1897, is devoted to the verb. Delbruck, while referring to work by other linguists, largely relies on his own research. He pays particular attention...

In 1920 1924 Jacob Wackernagel (1853 1938), Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Basel, published two volumes of lectures on Greek, Latin and German syntax based on his 1918 1919 courses for beginning undergraduates (who would already have studied all three languages at school). Wackernagel introduces the principles of grammatical functions and cross-linguistic work, and provides a foundation for the understanding of comparative syntax. The book remained in print for many decades thanks to its lively style and well-chosen examples from classical texts. The Sanskritist Louis...

Theodor Koch-Grunberg (1872 1924) was a noted German ethnologist and explorer whose work on the indigenous peoples of Brazil and Venezuela is still consulted by anthropologists, ethnologists and linguists. His most important book is this five-volume account of his expedition of 1911 1913 from the sandstone mountains bordering Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana through uncharted territory westwards to the Orinoco. Volume 4 contains the linguistic data collected on the expedition, including a grammatical description of Taulipang (Taurepan) with word lists and texts. Eighteen further languages and...

Johann Severin Vater (1771 1826) was professor of theology and Oriental languages at Halle, but his wide-ranging linguistic interests included Slavonic and Native North American languages (the latter classified using data provided by Alexander von Humboldt). This book, first published in 1815, describes itself as a bibliography pertaining to 'all the languages of the world'. It is a monument to late eighteenth-century research into languages and linguistics, listing for each of its entries relevant texts with lexicons and grammars of the language in question. It was a valuable resource for...

William MartinLeake (1777 1860) first published Researches in Greece in 1814. The book is a survey of the languages and dialects spoken in modern Greece and the Southern Balkans during the early nineteenth century. It was a pioneering work of linguistics that created great interest among Western European scholars. Chapter 1 deals with modern Greek, with sections on grammar, orthography, and phonetics; modern literature, including a catalogue of modern Greek authors; the Tzakonic dialect; and pronunciation and regional variation. Chapter 2 covers Albanian and includes sections on phonetics,...

Johann Severin Vater (1771 1826) was professor of theology and Oriental languages at Halle, but his linguistic interests also included Slavonic and Native North American languages. This book, first published in 1822, was a landmark publication of the first generation of Indo-European comparative philology, and was intended as a resource for future comparative study. It includes a substantial contribution by Rasmus Rask, the influential and prolific early Danish linguist, comparing members of the 'Thracian' family of languages, as he called Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Slavonic and Germanic...

Johann Severin Vater (1771 1826) was professor of theology and Oriental languages at Halle, but his linguistic interests ranged far more widely. This 1801 publication is the thirty-year-old scholar's ambitious attempt to outline a universal theory of language. Vater begins with a short definition of language, and two chapters speculating on the origins of human language and mechanisms for language change. These theoretical chapters, Vater says, were intended to be accessible to students making the transition from classics to philosophy. Vater then proposes the possibility of an overarching...

Karl von den Steinen (1855 1929) was a German physician, explorer and ethnologist who did pioneering work on the anthropology of Brazil's indigenous peoples. This book, published in 1886, describes the first of his two expeditions to the previously uncharted Xingu River. It begins with observations of colonial society in the coastal cities, an economic overview, and a summary of European exploration in the region. The main part of the book mixes sustained narrative and descriptive passages recounting the party's experiences with day by day journal notes on topography, geology, flora, fauna...

In the first of three exploratory missions into the Amazon basin, the French explorer, geologist, and scholar Henri Coudreau spent nearly seven months on the Tapajoz river, from 28 July 1895 to 7 January 1896. Coudreau was working as a teacher and scientist in French Guyana when he was commissioned by the governor of Brazil's Para state to explore the Amazon's tributaries. His 1897 Voyage au Tapajoz carefully records the villages, towns, peoples, and environs encountered throughout his journey. Illustrations, meteorological tables, and vocabularies of indigenous languages demonstrate...

C. H. Armbruster (1874 1957) was a civil servant in the Anglo-Sudan government and a linguist specialising in African languages. After visiting Ethiopia on diplomatic missions in 1906 and 1907 Armbruster published this three-volume reference work on colloquial, spoken Amharic between 1908 and 1920. Armbruster's study of Amharic was one of the first to be written in English, and exemplifies the shift among linguists away from the formal, classics-based style of earlier reference grammars towards a focus on colloquial speech and communication. The examples are drawn from direct knowledge of the...