On the other hand, the isolation of the Indo European languages, the constitution of a comparative grammar, the study of inﬂections, the formulation of the laws of vowel gradation and consonantal changes in short, the whole body of philological work accomplished by Grimm, Schlegel, Rask, and Bopp, has remained on the fringes of our historical awareness, as though it had merely provided the basis for a somewhat lateral and esoteric discipline as though, in fact, it was not the whole mode of being of language (and of our own language) that had been modified through it.