A Short Historical Outline of Historical Comparative and Typological Linguistics (ID:1096140)

Many European scientists as early as the 17th and 18th centuries had pointed to the existence of some common features in different languages This idea came to being especially in the minds of the first Europeans who had visited India in the 16th and 17th centuries. They were often struck by the great similarity in the lingual form (sounding) and meaning of a number of common words like mother, brother, sister, etc. This was noticed already by Krasuskiy M. (1880) and by our Kharkovite and Kyivan Indologists P. Richter and O. Barannykov (20s - 30s of the 20th century)