the editorial Committee of the journal Veleia decided to dedicate the 2016 special dossier to commemorating the second centenary of the publication of Franz Bopp's work, Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jedem der griechischen, latenischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: andreäische Buchhandlung), commonly considered the foundational work of comparative linguistics as a scientific discipline and of indo-european linguistics as its

more »

... te form as regards an academic discipline. Having received the assignment to prepare the dossier, we three editors focused on its general features, agreeing on themes which would be interesting to address within the limits allowed by the journal, as well as the authors most suited to carrying this out. we wanted to combine several aspects at the same time. on the one hand was the obvious commemorative nature of the plan, for which it was appropriate to allocate one contribution to commenting on the figure of Franz Bopp himself and evaluating his contribution to the creation of comparative linguistics taking into account the scientific context of the time. on the other hand, however, we did not want the dossier to be exclusively historiographical, but instead we thought that the commemoration offered a good opportunity to reflect on several aspects, both theoretical and practical, of the discipline through its two-hundred-year lifespan. we prepared the content according to a twin focus: some contributions would concentrate on demonstrating both the most significant achievements realised by indo-european linguistics in this period and the most important problems it confronts today, specifically addressing certain particular aspects such as morphology and grammaticalization, synthetic reconstruction and the vision of the indo-european family and its dialectical relations, with special attention paid to anatolian. we also thought that it would be appropriate to offer a general presentation of the achievements realised by comparative linguistics in other linguistic families. an obvious case was provided by the work on amerindian languages, which are diametrically opposed to the indo-european languages as regards their documented tradition but which, thanks to the works of leonard Bloomfield on the reconstruction of Proto-algonquian, implied a benchmark in order to validate the universal application of the comparative method. Choosing the authors to be assigned with the contributions was an easy task: they would be specialists of international standing in their respective fields of research, and if possible they would have had some prior academic relationship with our institution. as such, in order to comment on 1 ' on the conjugational system of the sanskrit language in comparison with that of the Greek, latin, Persian and Germanic language'.