Everything about Antoine Meillet totally explained
Antoine Meillet (
Paul-Jules-Antoine Meillet,
November 11,
1866 -
September 21,
1936), was one of the most important French linguists of the early
20th century. Meillet began his studies at the
Sorbonne, where he was influenced by
Michel Bréal,
Ferdinand de Saussure, and the members of the
Année Sociologique. In
1890 he was part of a research trip to the
Caucasus, where he studied
Armenian. After his return, since de Saussure had gone back to
Geneva, he continued the series of lectures on
comparative grammar that the Swiss linguist had formerly given.
Meillet completed his doctorate -
Research on the Use of the Genitive-Accusative in Old Slavonic in 1897. In 1902 he took a chair in Armenian at the
École des Langues Orientales. In 1905 he was elected to the
College de France, where he taught on the history and structure of
Indo-European languages. He worked closely with noted linguists
Paul Pelliot and
Robert Gauthiot.
Today Meillet is remembered as the mentor of an entire generation of linguists and
philologists who would become central to French linguistics in the twentieth century, such as
Émile Benveniste,
Georges Dumézil, and
André Martinet.
Antoine Meillet and Homeric Studies
At the Sorbonne, beginning in 1924, Meillet supervised
Milman Parry. In 1923, a year before Milman Parry began his studies with Meillet, Meillet wrote the following (which, in the first of his two French theses, Parry quotes):
Homeric epic is entirely composed of formulae handed down from poet to poet. An examination of any passage will quickly reveal that it's made up of lines and fragments of lines which are reproduced word for word in one or several other passages. Even those lines of which the parts happen not to recur in any other passage have the same formulaic character, and it's doubtless pure chance that they're not attested elsewhere.
Meillet offered the opinion that this pattern (the so-called
Oral Formulaic Hypothesis) might be a distinctive feature of orally transmitted epics (which the
Iliad was said to be). He suggested to Parry that he observe the mechanics of a living
oral tradition to confirm whether this suggestion was valid; he also introduced Parry to the
Slovene scholar
Matija Murko, who had written extensively about the heroic epic tradition in
Serbo-Croat and particularly in
Bosnia with the help of phonograph recordings. From Parry's resulting research in Bosnia, the records of which are now housed at Harvard University, he and his student
Albert Lord revolutionized
Homeric studies.
Meillet and international languages
Meillet supported the use of an international auxiliary language. In his book
The Search for the Perfect Language, Umberto Eco cites Meillet as saying, "Any kind of theoretical discussion is useless,
Esperanto is functioning". In addition, Meillet was a consultant with the
International Auxiliary Language Association, which presented
Interlingua in 1951.
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