Meillet, Antoine

Meillet, Antoine

(born Nov. 11, 1866, Moulins, France—died Sept. 21, 1936, Châteaumeillant) French linguist. He argued that any attempt to account for linguistic change must recognize that language is a social phenomenon. His Introduction to the Comparative Study of the Indo-European Languages (1903) explained the relationships of the Indo-European languages to each other and to their parent tongue. Meillet suggested that languages that develop farther from a centre of common origin are less disturbed by changes at the point of origin and more likely to retain archaic characteristics. He produced authoritative grammars of classical Armenian and Old Iranian and made notable contributions to Slavic studies.

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Meillet, Antoine 

Born Nov. 11, 1866, in Moulins; died Sept. 21, 1936, in Châteaumeillant. French linguist. Member of the Académic des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1924) and of many foreign academies and societies. Corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1906).

Meillet studied at the Sorbonne and became a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes (1891) and at the College de France (1906). In 1889 he became a member of the Paris Linguistics Society, serving as its secretary from 1906 to 1936.

Meillet was a follower of F. de Saussure; he led the sociological school of linguistics. His chief works were devoted to comparative Indo-European linguistics, to specific language families, including the Slavic, Germanic, and Iranian, and to individual languages, including Greek, Latin, Armenian, and Hittite. In collaboration with M. Cohen, Meillet published Languages of the World (2nd ed., 1952).

WORKS

Les Dialectes indo-europeens, 2nd ed. Paris, 1922.
La Méthode comparative en linguistique historique. Oslo [et al.], 1925.
Linguistique historique et linguistique generale, 2nd ed., vols. 1–2. Paris, 1926–36.
In Russian translation:
Vvedenie v sravnitel’noe izuchenie indoevropeiskikh iazykov. Moscow-Leningrad, 1938.
Obshcheslavianskii iazyk. Moscow, 1951.
Osnovnye osobennosti germanskoi gruppy iazykov. Moscow, 1952.

REFERENCES

Shcherba, L. V. “Pamiati A. Meillet.” Voprosy iazykoznaniia, 1966, no. 3.
Sommerfelt, A. “Antoine Meillet: The Scholar and the Man.” In Portraits of Linguists, vol. 2. Bloomington-London, 1966.

R. A. AGEEVA