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The earliest stages of Persian-German language comparison
- Author(s): Toon Van Hal
- Source: History of Linguistics 2008 , pp 147-165
- Publication Date April 2011
Renaissance Europe (re)discovered Persia and its language. Despite the supposed Semitic nature of Persian, some striking lexical similarities between this language and the Germanic languages became unmistakable to many Western scholars. Until the elaboration of comparative linguistics as an autonomous academic discipline at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dutch (or German) and Persian were often considered to have a privileged relationship, an idea which gave birth to the so-called “Persian-German theory”. This contribution aims to shed new light on the earliest stages of Persian and German vocabulary comparison carried out by Dutch humanists. The role played by Franciscus Raphelengius (senior), Justus Lipsius, Josephus Justus Scaliger will be re-evaluated. Furthermore, Hugo Grotius’s and Marnix van Sint-Aldegonde’s contribution, which has been largely overlooked in this connection, will be focused upon. The remainder of the paper will discuss the various approaches to the Persian-Germanic hypothesis after its initial formulation.
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