Birth of Friedrich Müller (March 5, 1834)

Friedrich Müller was an Austrian scholar of linguistics and ethnography who wrote about languages of the world, including Armenian.

He was born in Jemnik, Bohemia (now Czech Republic) on March 5, 1834. He studied at the University of Göttingen and completed his studiesat Vienna University (1853-1857) in classical studies as well as Sanskrit and comparative philology. In 1858, he took up the position as a librarian in the university library, and from 1861, at the imperial court library (present-day Austrian National Library) until 1866. At the end of 1859, he obtained his doctorate from the University of Tübingen. In 1860, he qualified as a university lecturer in general linguistics. In 1866, he was appointed extraordinary professor of Oriental languages at Vienna University, and in 1869, he became full professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology. The same year he was elected full member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

Müller was an extremely versatile linguist who published about languages of all five continents. From his student days he used to learn a multitude of languages by self-study; in later years, he learned mostly based on materials collected by missionaries and people participating in scientific expeditions. He pursued the objective of a kind of universal linguistics and undertook building a bridge from linguistics to ethnology and anthropology. He was the founder and main advocate of so-called “linguistic ethnography.” He worked on a genealogical classification and a description of all the languages around the globe known in his time. On several occasions, he presented classifications of all languages and all human races.

Müller focused especially on the Iranian languages, including Armenian among them. He continued doing so even after Heinrich Hübschmann had proven in 1875 that Armenian is an independent branch within the Indo-European family of languages. Erroneously, Müller laid too much weight on etymology and on single words that he did not recognize properly as borrowings. He published various multi-part series of treatises dealing with the Armenian language in the periodicals of the Academy of Sciences, treating all levels of phonology and morphology with an explicitly comparative orientation.

He also wrote about the invention of the Armenian alphabet and the works of various Armenian ancient writers.

He passed away in Vienna on May 25, 1898.