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...

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...