Introduction à l’étude comparative des langues indo-européennes

Antoine Meillet's Introduction à l'étude comparative des langues indo-européennes is a foundational work in comparative linguistics. It explains the relationships between Indo-European languages and their common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. Meillet emphasized that language is a social phenomenon and explored psychological factors in linguistic change.1

The comparative method, used to reconstruct parent languages like Proto-Indo-European, relies on identifying regular correspondences between related words in different languages. This method assumes regular sound changes, though criticisms exist regarding its genealogical metaphor and the assumption of only divergence between languages. The Indo-European family includes branches like Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, all believed to have originated from a common ancestral tongue spoken around 4000 BCE.234