The origins of the Greek lexicon:Ex Oriente Lux

Abstract

1. For more than two thousand years research into the origins of the Greek lexicon had been understood and carried on in the spirit exemplified but also mocked in the Platonic Kratylos. The revolutionary change came in the early nineteenth century when after many inspired guesses Franz Bopp (1791–1867) finally and definitively proved in 1816 that Greek, in company with many European languages, derived, like Indian and Iranian, from one prehistoric ancestor, the whole family being dubbedIndo-Europeanby the well-known physician and physicist, Dr Thomas Young, in 1813, three years before the publication of Bopp's work. But the first true etymologist was August Friedrich Pott (1802–87) who with the two volumes of hisEtymologische Forschungen, published in 1833 and 1836 respectively, laid the foundations of Indo-European, and therewith also Greek, etymology. Throughout the nineteenth century, and even down to our own days, the main emphasis has been on the IE origins of the Greek vocabulary.

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