Antoine Meillet

Who was Antoine Meillet?

Paul Jules Antoine Meillet 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 Année Sociologique. In 1890 he was part of a research trip to the Caucasus, where he studied Armenian. After his return, since de Saussure had gone back to Geneva, he continued the series of lectures on comparative grammar that the Swiss linguist had formerly given.

Meillet completed his doctorate, 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 Collège de France, where he taught on the history and structure of Indo-European languages. He worked closely with noted linguists Paul Pelliot and Robert Gauthiot.

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.