Bopp was born in Mainz, but the political disarray in the Republic of Mainz caused his parents' move to Aschaffenburg, the second seat of the Archbishop of Mainz. There he received a liberal education at the Lyceum and Karl Joseph Hieronymus Windischmann drew his attention to the languages and literature of the East. Moreover, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel's book, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, had just begun to exert a powerful influence on the minds of German philosophers and historians, and stimulated Bopp's interest in the sacred language of the Hindus.
Career
In 1812, he went to Paris at the expense of the Bavarian government, with a view to devoting himself vigorously to the study of Sanskrit. There he enjoyed the society of such eminent men as Antoine-Léonard de Chézy, Silvestre de Sacy, Louis Mathieu Langlès, and, above all Alexander Hamilton, cousin of the American statesman of the same name, who had acquired an acquaintance with Sanskrit when in India and had brought out, along with Langlès, a descriptive catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscripts of the Imperial Library. In the library, Bopp had access not only to the rich collection of Sanskrit manuscripts, but also to the Sanskrit books that had been issued from the Calcutta and Serampore presses. He spent five years of laborious study, almost living in the libraries of Paris and unmoved by the turmoils that agitated the world around him, including Napoleon's escape, the Waterloo campaign and the Restoration. The first paper from his years of study in Paris appeared in Frankfurt am Main in 1816, under the title of Über das Konjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache , to which Windischmann contributed a preface. In this first book, Bopp entered at once the path on which he would focus the philological researches of his whole subsequent life. His task was not to point out the similarity of Sanskrit with Persian, Greek, Latin or German, for previous scholars had long established that, but he aimed to trace the postulated common origin of the languages' grammatical forms, of their inflections from composition. This was something no predecessor had attempted. By a historical analysis of those forms, as applied to the verb, he furnished the first trustworthy materials for a history of the languages compared. After a brief sojourn in Germany, Bopp travelled to London where he made the acquaintance of Sir Charles Wilkins and Henry Thomas Colebrooke. He also became friends with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian ambassador at the Court of St. James's, to whom he taught Sanskrit. He brought out, in the Annals of Oriental Literature, an essay entitled "Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic Languages" in which he extended to all parts of grammar what he had done in his first book for the verb alone. He had previously published a critical edition, with a Latin translation and notes, of the story of Nala and Damayanti, the most beautiful episode of the Mahabharata. Other episodes of the Mahabharata, Indralokâgama, and three others ; Diluvium, and three others ; a new edition of Nala followed in due course, all of which, with August Wilhelm von Schlegel's edition of the Bhagavad Gita, proved excellent aids in initiating the early student into the reading of Sanskrit texts. On the publication, in Calcutta, of the whole Mahabharata, Bopp discontinued editing Sanskrit texts and confined himself thenceforth exclusively to grammatical investigations. After a short residence at Göttingen, Bopp gained, on the recommendation of Humboldt, appointment to the chair of Sanskrit and comparative grammar at the University of Berlin in 1821, which he occupied for the rest of his life. He also became a member of the Royal Prussian Academy the following year. In 1827, he published his Ausführliches Lehrgebäude der Sanskritsprache, on which he had worked since 1821. Bopp started work on a new edition in Latin, for the following year, completed in 1832; a shorter grammar appeared in 1834. At the same time he compiled a Sanskrit and Latin Glossary, in which, more especially in the second and third editions, he also took account of the cognate languages. His chief activity, however, centered on the elaboration of his Comparative Grammar, which appeared in six parts at considerable intervals, under the title Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Altslawischen, Gotischen und Deutschen. How carefully Bopp matured this work emerges from the series of monographs printed in the Transactions of the Berlin Academy, which preceded it. They bear the general title Vergleichende Zergliederung des Sanskrits und der mit ihm verwandten Sprachen . Two other essays followed the publication of the first part of the Comparative Grammar. Old Slavonian began to take its stand among the languages compared from the second part onwards. E. B. Eastwick translated the work into English in 1845. A second German edition, thoroughly revised, also covered Old Armenian. In his Comparative Grammar Bopp set himself a threefold task:
to give a description of the original grammatical structure of the languages as deduced from their inter-comparison.
to investigate the origin of their grammatical forms.
The first and second points remained dependent upon the third. As Bopp based his research on the best available sources and incorporated every new item of information that came to light, his work continued to widen and deepen in the making, as can be witnessed from his monographs on the vowel system in the Teutonic languages, on the Celtic languages, on the Old Prussian and Albanian languages, on the accent in Sanskrit and Greek, on the relationship of the Malayo-Polynesian to the Indo-European languages, and on the Caucasian languages. In the last two, the impetus of his genius led him on a wrong track. He is the first philologist to prove Albanian as a separate branch of Indo-European. Bopp was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855.
Criticism
Critics have charged Bopp with neglecting the study of the native Sanskrit grammars, but in those early days of Sanskrit studies, the great libraries of Europe did not hold the requisite materials; if they had, those materials would have demanded his full attention for years, and such grammars as those of Charles Wilkins and Henry Thomas Colebrooke, from which Bopp derived his grammatical knowledge, had all used native grammars as a basis. The further charge that Bopp, in his Comparative Grammar, gave undue prominence to Sanskrit is disproved by his own words; for, as early as 1820, he gave it as his opinion that frequently, the cognate languages serve to elucidate grammatical forms lost in Sanskrit, which he further developed in all his subsequent writings. The Encyclopædia Britannica assesses Bopp and his work as follows: English scholar Russell Martineau, who had studied under Bopp, gave the following tribute: Martineau also wrote:
