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"Agglutinating" A Family: Friedrich Max MüLler And The Development Of The Turanian Language Family Theory In Nineteenth-Century European Linguistics And Other Human Sciences, Preetham Sridharan

Dissertations and Theses

Some linguists in the nineteenth century argued for the existence of a "Turanian" family of languages in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia, claiming the common descent of a vast range of languages like Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, Mongol, Manchu, and their relatives and dialects. Of such linguists, Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900) was an important developer and popularizer of a version of the Turanian theory across Europe, given his influence as a German-born Oxford professor in Victorian England from the 1850s onwards. Although this theory lost ground in academic linguistics from the mid twentieth century, a pan-nationalist movement pushing for the political …