After a short residence at Göttingen, Bopp was, on the recommendation of Humboldt, appointed to the chair of Sanskrit and comparative grammar at Berlin in 1821, and was elected member of the Royal Prussian Academy in the following year. He brought out, in 1827, his Ausführliches Lehrgebäude der Sanskrita-Sprache, on which he had been engaged since 1821. A new edition, in Latin, was commenced in the following year, and completed in 1832; and a shorter grammar appeared in 1834. At the same time he compiled a Sanskrit and Latin glossary (1830) in which, more especially in the second and third editions (1847 and 1867), account was also taken of the cognate languages. His chief activity, however, centred on the elaboration of his Comparative Grammar, which appeared in six parts at considerable intervals (Berlin, 1833, 1835, 1842, 1847, 1849, 1852), under the title Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Altslavischen, Gothischen, und Deutschen. How carefully this work was matured may be gathered from the series of monographs printed in the Transactions of the Berlin Academy (1824 to 1831), by which it was preceded. They bear the general title, Vergleichende Zergliederung des Sanskrits und der mit ihm verwandten Sprachen. Two other essays (on the “Numerals,” 1835) followed the publication of the first part of the Comparative Grammar. The Old-Slavonian began to take its stand among the languages compared from the second part onwards. The work was translated into English by E. B. Eastwick in 1845. A second German edition, thoroughly revised (1856–1861), comprised also the Old-Armenian. From this edition an excellent French translation was made by Professor Michel Bréal in 1866. The task which Bopp endeavoured to carry out in his Comparative Grammar was threefold,—to give a description of the original grammatical structure of the languages as deduced from their intercomparison, to trace their phonetic laws, and to investigate the origin of their grammatical forms. The first and second points were subservient to the third. As Bopp’s researches were based on the best available sources, and incorporated every new item of information that came to light, so they continued to widen and deepen in their progress. Witness his monographs on the vowel system in the Teutonic languages (1836), on the Celtic languages (1839), on the Old-Prussian (1853) and Albanian languages (1854), on the accent in Sanskrit and Greek (1854), on the relationship of the Malayo-Polynesian with the Indo-European languages (1840), and on the Caucasian languages (1846). In the two last mentioned the impetus of his genius led him on a wrong track. Bopp has been charged with neglecting the study of the native Sanskrit grammars, but in those early days of Sanskrit studies the requisite materials were not accessible in the great libraries of Europe; and if they had been, they would have absorbed his exclusive attention for years, while such grammars as those of Wilkins and Colebrooke, from which his grammatical knowledge was derived, were all based on native grammars. The further charge that Bopp, in his Comparative Grammar, gave undue prominence to Sanskrit may be disproved by his own words; for, as early as the year 1820, he gave it as his opinion that frequently the cognate languages serve to elucidate grammatical forms lost in Sanskrit (Annals of Or. Lit. i. 3),—an opinion which he further developed in all his subsequent writings.
Bopp’s researches, carried with wonderful penetration into the most minute and almost microscopical details of linguistic phenomena, have led to the opening up of a wide and distant view into the original seats, the closer or more distant affinity, and the tenets, practices and domestic usages of the ancient Indo-European nations, and the science of comparative grammar may truly be said to date from his earliest publication. In grateful recognition of that fact, on the fiftieth anniversary (May 16, 1866) of the date of Windischmann’s preface to that work, a fund called Die Bopp-Stiftung, for the promotion of the study of Sanskrit and comparative grammar, was established at Berlin, to which liberal contributions were made by his numerous pupils and admirers in all parts of the globe. Bopp lived to see the results of his labours everywhere accepted, and his name justly celebrated. But he died, on the 23rd of October 1867, a poor man,—though his genuine kindliness and unselfishness, his devotion to his family and friends, and his rare modesty, endeared him to all who knew him.
See M. Bréal’s translation of Bopp’s Vergl. Gramm. (1866) introduction; Th. Benfey, Gesch. der Sprachwissenschaft (1869); A. Kuhn in Unsere Zeit, Neue Folge, iv. i (1868); Lefmann, Franz Bopp (Berlin, 1891–1897).
BOPPARD, a town of Germany, in the Prussian Rhine province, on the left bank of the Rhine, 12 m. S. of Coblenz on the main line to Cologne. Pop. (1900) 5806. It is an old town still partly surrounded by medieval walls, and its most noteworthy buildings are the Roman Catholic parish church (12th and 13th centuries); the Carmelite church (1318), the former castle, now used for administrative offices; the Evangelical church (1851, enlarged in 1887); and the former Benedictine monastery of the Marienberg, founded 1123 and since 1839 a hydropathic establishment, crowning a hill 100 ft. above the Rhine. Boppard is a favourite tourist centre, and being less pent in by hills than many other places in this part of the picturesque gorge of the Rhine, has in modern times become a residential town. It has some comparatively insignificant industries, such as tanning and tobacco manufacture; its direct trade is in wine and fruit.
Boppard (Baudobriga) was founded by the Romans; under the Merovingian dynasty it became a royal residence. During the middle ages it was a considerable centre of commerce and shipping, and under the Hohenstaufen emperors was raised to the rank of a free imperial city. In 1312, however, the emperor Henry VII. pledged the town to his brother Baldwin, archbishop-elector of Trier, and it remained in the possession of the electors until it was absorbed by France during the Revolutionary epoch. It was assigned by the congress of Vienna in 1815 to Prussia.
BORA, an Italian name for a violent cold northerly and north-easterly wind, common in the Adriatic, especially on the Istrian
and Dalmatian coasts. There is always a northern tendency in the winds on the north Mediterranean shores in winter owing to the cold air of the mountains sliding down to the sea where the pressure is less. When, therefore, a cyclone is formed over the Mediterranean, the currents in its north-western area draw the air from the cold northern regions, and during the passage of the cyclone the bora prevails. The bora also occurs at Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. It is precisely similar in character to the mistral which prevails in Provençe and along the French Mediterranean littoral.
BORACITE, a mineral of special interest on account of its optical anomalies. Small crystals bounded on all sides by sharply defined faces are found in considerable numbers embedded in gypsum and anhydrite in the salt deposits at Lüneburg in Hanover, where it was first observed in 1787. In external form these crystals are cubic with inclined hemihedrism, the symmetry being the same as in blende and tetrahedrite. Their habit varies according to whether the tetrahedron (fig. 1), the cube (fig. 2). or the rhombic dodecahedron (fig. 3) predominates.
Fig. 1.Fig. 2.Fig. 3.
Crystals of Boracite
Penetration twins with a tetrahedron face as twin-plane are sometimes observed. The crystals vary from translucent to transparent, are possessed of a vitreous lustre, and are colourless or white, though often tinged with grey, yellow or green. The hardness is as high as 7 on Mohs’ scale; specific gravity 3.0. As first observed by R. J. Haüy in 1791, the crystals are markedly pyroelectric; a cube when heated becomes positively electrified on four of its corners and negatively on the four opposite corners. In a
