Johannes Schmidt | |
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| Born | Johannes Friedrich Heinrich Schmidt (1843-07-29)29 July 1843 |
| Died | 4 July 1901(1901-07-04) (aged 57) |
| Known for | |
Johannes Friedrich Heinrich Schmidt (29 July 1843 – 4 July 1901) was a Germanlinguist. He developed theWellentheorie ('wave theory') of language development.
Schmidt was born inPrenzlau,Province of Brandenburg. He was educated atBonn and atJena where he studiedphilology (historical linguistics) withAugust Schleicher and specialized inIndo-European, especiallySlavic, languages. He earned a doctorate in 1865 and worked from 1866 as a teacher at agymnasium inBerlin.
In 1868 Schmidt was invited by theUniversity of Bonn to accept a professorship ofGerman and Slavic languages. InBonn he published the workDie Verwandtschaftsverhältnisse der indogermanischen Sprachen ('The Relationships of the Indo-Germanic Languages', 1872), which presented hisWellentheorie ('wave theory'). According to this theory, new features of a language spread from a central area in continuously weakening concentric circles, similar to the waves created when a stone is thrown into a body of water. This should result in convergence among dissimilar languages. The theory was directed against the doctrine ofsound laws introduced by theNeogrammarians in 1870, and contrasted with Schleicher's phylogenetic model.
From 1873 to 1876 Schmidt was a professor of philology at theUniversity of Graz inAustria. In 1876 he returned to Berlin, where he worked as a professor atHumboldt University. He died in Berlin at the age of fifty-seven.
He was joint editor withErnst Kuhn of theZeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung (Journal for Comparative Language Research) from 1875 until 1901.
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