Antoine Meillet mentored a generation of influential twentieth-century linguists and philologists, including Emile Benveniste, Georges Dumezil, and Andre Martinet. One of the most influential comparative linguists of his time, he recognised that language is a social phenomenon, influenced by sociological factors. Originally published in 1933, this third edition of his 1928 history of Latin was the last to be published during his lifetime. In it, Meillet explores the historical context and significance of Latin. He describes how it developed from Indo-European and evolved according to the...

This history of Greek explores its Indo-European origins and the historical and sociological factors which influenced its later development.

The distinguished French linguist Antoine Meillet (1866 1936) was a pupil of Saussure and one of the most important researchers and teachers of the twentieth century in the field of Indo-European languages, counting among his own pupils Benveniste, Dumezil and Martinet. In this book, first published in 1917, Meillet shows the unique features which mark out the Germanic languages (including English) from the rest of the Indo-European family. Acknowledging that the earliest written examples become available only long after 'proto-Germanic' had split into its various successor languages, he...

First published in 1903, Antoine Meillet's Introduction a l'Etude comparative des langues Indo-Europeennes exemplifies the key methodologies and insights of early twentieth-century comparative linguistics. Its primary aim, as Meillet states, was 'tres limite': to provide a brief but comprehensive overview of the Indo-European languages and their shared linguistic structures. He accomplished this object and more in his Introduction, outlining a theory of language change that would influence a generation of linguists, including his students Emile Benveniste and Andre Martinet. Meillet's debt to...