Antoine Meillet, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Antoine Meillet

French linguist

Date of Birth: 11-Nov-1866

Place of Birth: Moulins, Auvergne-RhĂ´ne-Alpes, France

Date of Death: 21-Sep-1936

Profession: professor, linguist, lexicographer, armenologist

Nationality: France

Zodiac Sign: Scorpio


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About Antoine Meillet

  • Paul Jules Antoine Meillet (French: [?~twan m?j?]; 11 November 1866, Moulins, France – 21 September 1936, Châteaumeillant, France) was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century.
  • He began his studies at the Sorbonne University, where he was influenced by Michel BrĂ©al, Ferdinand de Saussure and the members of the L'AnnĂ©e Sociologique.
  • In 1890, he was part of a research trip to the Caucasus, where he studied the Armenian language.
  • After his return, de Saussure had gone back to Geneva so he continued the series of lectures on comparative linguistics that the Swiss linguist had 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 Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales and took under his wing Hrachia Adjarian, who would become the founder of modern Armenian dialectology.
  • In 1905, he was elected to the Collège de France, where he taught on the history and structure of Indo-European languages.
  • One of his most-quoted statements is that "anyone wishing to hear how Indo-Europeans spoke should come and listen to a Lithuanian peasant".
  • He worked closely with 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 DumĂ©zil, and AndrĂ© Martinet. In 1921, with the help of linguists Paul Boyer and AndrĂ© Mazon, he founded the Revue des Ă©tudes slaves

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