BOPP, FRANZ (1791-1867), German philologist, born at Mainz on Sept. 14, 1791, educated at Aschaffenburg, in Bavaria. In 1812 he went to Paris to study Sanskrit. In 1816 he pub lished, at Frankfort-on-Main, fiber das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, late inischen, persischen and germanischen Sprache. The object of Bopp's researches was to trace the common origin of the gram matical forms or inflections of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin and German, a task which had never before been attempted. By an historical analysis of those forms, as applied to the verb, he furnished the first trustworthy materials for a history of the languages compared.
Bopp visited London and brought out, in the Annals of Oriental Literature (London, 182o), an essay entitled, "Analytical Corn parison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic Languages," in which he extended to all parts of the grammar what he had done in his first book for the verb alone. He had previously pub lished a critical edition, with a Latin translation and notes, of the story of Nala and Damayanti (London, 1819), the most beautiful episode of the Mahabharata. Other episodes of the Mahabharata —Indralokdgamanam, and three others (Berlin, 1824) ; Diluvium, and three others (Berlin, 1829) ; and a new edition of Nala (Berlin, 1832)—followed in due course.
In 1821 Bopp was appointed to the chair of Sanskrit and com parative grammar at Berlin, and was elected member of the Royal Prussian academy in the following year. He brought out, in 1827, his Ausfiihrliches Lehrgebaude der Sanskrita-Sprache, on which he had been engaged since 1821. A new edition, in Latin, was commenced in the following year, and completed in 1832; and a shorter grammar appeared in 1834. At the same time he compiled a Sanskrit and Latin glossary (183o) in which, more especially in the second and third editions (1847 and 1867), account was also taken of the cognate languages. His chief activity, however, centred on the elaboration of his Comparative Grammar, which appeared in six parts (1833-52) as Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Altslavisclten, Gothischen, and Deutschen. (Eng. trans. by E. B. Eastwick, 1845.) Two other essays (on the "Numerals," followed the publication of the first part of the Comparative Grammar. The Old Slavonian began to take its stand among the languages compared from the second part onwards. A second German edition, thoroughly revised (1856-61), comprised also the Old Armenian. Bopp tried in his grammar to give a description of the original grammatical structure of the languages as deduced from their intercomparison, to trace their phonetic laws, and especially to investigate the origin of their grammatical forms. He also wrote monographs on the vowel system in the Teutonic languages (1836), on the Celtic languages (1839), on the Old Prussian (1853), and Albanian languages (1854), on the accent in Sanskrit and Greek (1854), on the relationship of the Malayo Polynesian with the Indo-European languages (184o), and on the Caucasian languages (1846).
See M. Breal's translation of Bopp's V ergl. Gramm. (1866) , intro duction; Th. Benfey, Gesch. der Sprachwissenschaft (1869) ; A. Kuhn in Unsere Zeit, Neue Folge, iv. i (i868) ; Lefmann, Franz Bopp (1891-97).