Bopp, FRANZ, the distinguished philologist, was born at Mainz, 14th September 1791. By the lectures of Windschmann, he was led to devote himself to the study of oriental languages, a study which he continued under Chézy, De Sacy, and A. W. Schlegel at Paris. Here he composed his first work on The Conjugation of the Sanskrit Verb (1816), in which he scientifically demonstrated the original community of the Indo-European languages. He next removed to London, aided by a small pension from the King of Bavaria, where he published an improved edition of his previous work, and at the same time edited several episodes from the Mahābhārata. He returned to Germany in 1821, and some years after received the appointment of professor of Oriental Languages at Berlin, where he remained till his death, which took place 23d October 1867.
During these years he published his great work, A Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavonic, Gothie, and German (1833-52); in a new edition he added Old Armenian. A final edition was published after his death (1871). It was translated into English by Eastwick (3d ed. 1862). In this work he elaborated his theory of the origin of grammatical inflection. According to this all the words of the Indo-European languages are derived from monosyllabic roots which are of two kinds, verbal and pronominal, and by the addition of one or several of such roots to another root, grammatical inflection is produced. Bopp further held that this stage of language, which has been called the agglutinative, was prior to the separation of the Indo-European languages, and that their succeeding history was one of phonetic decay, not of growth. It is in the treatment of this part of the history of language that Bopp is at his weakest. He allowed himself great latitude in dealing with phonetic laws, and finally showed he had no true method at all when he made the unfortunate attempt to connect the Malay-Polynesian languages (1841) with the Indo-European.
Besides the works mentioned above, Bopp wrote monographs on the Celtic, Caucasian, Old Prussian, and Albanian languages, as well as a Sanskrit grammar and glossary. See the Life by Lefmann (1892).