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Johan Ihre (3 March 1707 – 1 December 1780) was aSwedish philologist and historical linguist.
Ihre was born inLund, son of the theologianThomas Ihre and his spouse Brita Steuchia. After his father's death in 1720, Johan Ihre was raised in the house of his grandfatherArchbishopMattias Stechius inUppsala, and studied atUppsala University, where he completed hismagister degree in 1730. In 1730-1733 he studied abroad, inOxford,London andParis. He was in 1734 appointeddocent in Uppsala, 1735 librarian at the University Library, and was from 1737 until his death holder of the Skyttean professorship in Eloquence and Government. He became a member of theRoyal Academy of Letters in 1755. He was secretary of theRoyal Swedish Society of Sciences in Uppsala.
Ihre was the first scholar to recognize thesound change of theGermanic languages that was later to be elaborated on byRasmus Christian Rask andJakob Grimm and now known after the latter asGrimm's law.
In 1737 the German philologistJohann Georg Wachter (1663–1757) published anetymological dictionary of the German language,Glossarium Germanicum. This book had a great influence on Johan Ihre: in 1769 he published, along the same lines as Wachter's work, a Swedish etymological dictionary.[1] Ihre's etymological dictionary ofSwedish demonstrated the origin of words inOld Swedish forms and compared them tocognates in other languages. Ihre thought, in accordance with the historical speculations common at the time and derived from Icelandic sources, that the language had been brought to the Nordic countries byOdin. Ihre was also the first to demonstrate that the text of theCodex argenteus manuscript in the Uppsala University Library is identical to theGothic Bible translation by BishopWulfila.
This article contains content from theOwl Edition ofNordisk familjebok, a Swedish encyclopedia published between 1904 and 1926, now in thepublic domain.
