Antoine Meillet

From Freepedia

Antoine Meillet (Paul-Jules-Antoine Meillet, November 11, 1866 - September 21, 1936), was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. Meillet began his studies at the Sorbonne, where he was influenced by Michel Bréal, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the members of the Annee Sociologique. In 1890 he was part of a research trip to the Caucasus, where he studied Armenian. After his return he continued his studies with Saussure.

Meillet completed his doctorat - Research on the Use of the Genitive-Accusative in Old Slavonic in 1897. In 1902 he took a chair in Armenian at the École des Langues Orientales. In 1905 he was elected to the College de France, where he taught on the history and structure of Indo-European languages.

Today Meillet is remembered as the mentor of an entire generation of linguists and philologists who would become central to French linguistics in the twentieth century, such as Émile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, and André Martinet.

Antoine Meillet and Homeric Studies

At the Sorbonne, beginning in 1924, Meillet supervised Milman Parry. In 1923, a year before Milman Parry began his studies with Miellet, Miellet wrote the following (which, in the first of his two French theses, Parry quotes):

Homeric epic is entirely composed of formulae handed down from poet to poet. An examination of any passage will quickly reveal that it is made up of lines and fragments of lines which are reproduced word for word in one or several other passages. And even lines, parts of which are not found in another passage, have the character of formulae, and it is doubtless pure chance that they are not attested elsewhere.

Miellet directed Parry to study how oral tradition operates in its native setting snd suggested to Parry that he observe the mechanics of a living oral tradition rather than simply a text (i.e. Iliad) that appears to have the marks of oral tradition upon it. As a result, Meillet introduced Parry to the Prague scholar Matija Murko, who had written extensively about the heroic epic tradition in the Balkans among the South Slavs. From this research, which is now housed at Harvard University, Parry and his student Albert Lord, revolutionized Homeric studies.