The ancient Greeks and Romans readily perceived that their languages were related to each other but an

accurate idea of the true bounds of the Indo-European family became possible only when, in the 16th century,
Europeans began to learn Sanskrit.
 The massive similarities between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek were noted early, but the first person to make
the correct inference and state it conspicuously was the British Orientalist and jurist Sir William Jones, who in
1786 said in his presidential address to the Bengal Asiatic Society that Sanskrit bore to both Greek and Latin
Nineteenth-century linguists firmly established the connections that Jones had elucidated and broadened the
family to include Slavic, Baltic, and other language groups.

 Franz Bopp,
in which the relation of these five languages was demonstrated on the basis of a detailed comparison of
verb morphology (structure). 
Danish philologist Rasmus Rask
This work demonstrated methodically the relation of Germanic to Latin, Greek, Slavic, and Baltic. (Rask
included Celtic a few years later.)

In 1822 the second edition of the first volume of Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik (“Germanic Grammar”)
was published. In this grammar were discussed the peculiar Indo-European vowel alternations called Ablaut by
Grimm (e.g., English sing, sang, sung; or Greek peíth-ō ‘I persuade,’ pé-poith-a ‘I am persuaded,’ é-pith-on ‘I
persuaded’). In addition, Grimm tried to find the principle behind the correspondences of
Germanic stop and spirant consonants (the first made with complete stoppage of the breath, and the second
made with constriction of the breath but not complete stoppage) to the consonants of other Indo-European
languages. The sound changes implied by these correspondences have become known as Grimm’s law.
Examples of it include the stop consonant p in Latin pater corresponding to the spirant consonant f in father,
and the correspondences between English and Greek t, d, and th discussed above.

Bopp demonstrated in 1839 that the Celtic languages were Indo-European, as had been asserted by Jones. In
1850 the German philologist August Schleicher did the same for Albanian, and in 1877 another German
philologist, Heinrich Hübschmann, showed that Armenian was an independent branch of Indo-European,
rather than a member of the Iranian subbranch. Since then the Indo-European family has been enlarged by the
discovery of Tocharian languages and of Hittite and the other Anatolian languages and by the recognition, with
the aid of Hittite, that Lycian, known and partly deciphered already in the 19th century, belongs to the
Anatolian branch of Indo-European.

The first full comparative grammar of the major Indo-European languages was Bopp’s Vergleichende
Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Altslawischen, Gotischen und
Deutschen (1833–52; “Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic,
and German”). But this and Schleicher’s shorter Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der
indogermanischen Sprachen (1861–62; “Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European
Languages”) were rendered obsolete by the major breakthrough of the 1870s
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The difference between Gothic d in fadar ‘father’ and þ in broþar ‘brother,’ for example, both corresponding
to t in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, proved to be correlated with the original position of the accent, a discovery
known as Verner’s law (named for the Danish linguist Karl Verner). Thus, d appears when the preceding
syllable was originally unaccented (fadar: Greek patér-, Sanskrit pitár-), and þ occurs when the preceding
syllable was originally accented (broþar: Greek phrā́ter- ‘member of a clan,’ Sanskrit bhrā́tar-).