Franz Bopp

Born 14 September 1791 in Germany, Bopp turned to linguistics at a time when the field barely existed as a science. His extensive comparative work on Indo-European languages revealed systematic sound shifts and grammatical structures that linked cultures separated by millennia and continents. The method he pioneered — patient, rigorous comparison of verb forms, noun cases, and phonetic patterns — became the foundation of historical linguistics. He died 23 October 1867, having spent a career proving that language families were as real and traceable as biological ones.