Franz Bopp

"For what is more important and can be desired more urgently from the study of classical languages than the comparison of these with our mother tongue in its most ancient, most perfect form?”"

"They would not have it, they would not believe that there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers of India. The classical scholars scouted the idea, and I still remember the time, when 1 was a student at Leipzig and begun to study Sanskrit, with what contempt any remarks on Sanskrit or comparative grammar were treated by my teachers. . . . No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin and Gothic. All hands were against him. (28) Unlike some of his contemporaries, Muller was effusive in his admiration for things Indian (although he never subscribed to an Indian homeland). In his course of lectures "India: What Can It Teach Us?" (1883), he declared that she was "the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow," indeed, "a very paradise on earth," a place where "the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, [and] has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life. [Such lavish praise was far too extreme for those who, as Muller himself noted, would be] "horror struck at the idea that the humanity they meet with [in India] . . . should be able to teach us any lesson."

"Though Bopp, by the end of his life, was an internationally respected and honored scholar, his was not a career without conflict. Reflecting much later on the difficulties his teacher faced, Max Muller recalled the period in the 1820s and 1830s in which scholars and especially classicists would not believe that there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers of India.... No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, and Gothic. All hands were against him; and if in comparing Greek and Latin with Sanskrit, Gothic, Celtic, Slavonic, or Persian, he happened to have placed one single accent wrong, the shouts of those who knew nothing but Greek and Latin, and probably looked in their Greek Dictionaries to be quite sure of their accents, would never end."