Franz Felix Adalbert Kuhn (19 November 1812 – 5 May 1881) was a German

philologist Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as th ...

and folklorist. Kuhn was born in Königsberg in

Brandenburg Brandenburg (; nds, Brannenborg; dsb, Bramborska ) is a state in the northeast of Germany bordering the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Saxony, as well as the country of Poland. With an area of 29,480 squar ...

's Neumark region. From 1841 he was connected with the Köllnisches Gymnasium at Berlin, of which he was appointed director in 1870. Kuhn was the founder of a new school of comparative mythology, based upon comparative philology. Inspired by Jakob Grimm's ''

Deutsche Mythologie ''Deutsche Mythologie'' (, ''Teutonic Mythology'') is a treatise on Germanic mythology by Jacob Grimm. First published in Germany in 1835, the work is an exhaustive treatment of the subject, tracing the mythology and beliefs of the ancient Germani ...

'', he first devoted himself to German stories and legends, and published ''Märkische Sagen und Märchen'' (1842), ''Norddeutsche Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche'' (1848), and ''Sagen, Gebräuche und Märchen aus Westfalen'' (1859). But it is on Kuhn's researches into the language and history of the Indo-Germanic peoples as a whole that his reputation is founded. His chief works in this connection are ''Zur ältesten Geschichte der Indogermanischen Völker'' (1845), in which he endeavoured to give an account of the earliest civilization of the Indo-Germanic peoples before their separation into different families, by comparing and analysing the original meaning of the words and stems common to the different languages; ''Die Herabkunft des Feuers und des Göttertranks'' (1859; new edition by

Ernst Kuhn Ernst Wilhelm Adalbert Kuhn (7 February 1846, in Berlin – 21 August 1920, in Munich) was a German Indologist and Indo-Europeanist. He was the son of philologist Adalbert Kuhn. He studied at the universities of Berlin and Tübingen, receiv ...

, under title of ''Mythologische Studien'', 1886); and ''Über Entwicklungsstufen der Mythenbildung'' (1873), in which he maintained that the origin of myths was to be looked for in the domain of language, and that their most essential factors were polysemy and

homonymy In linguistics, homonyms are words which are homographs (words that share the same spelling, regardless of pronunciation), or homophones (equivocal words, that share the same pronunciation, regardless of spelling), or both. Using this definition, ...

. Kuhn was also the editor of the '' Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der Indogermanischen Sprachen'', which was at his time the standard periodical on the subject. Kuhn died in Berlin. See obituary notice by C. F. H. Bruchmann in Bursian's ''Biographisches Jahrbuch'' (1881) and J. Schmidt in the above ''Zeitschrift'', xxvi. n.s. 6.

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* {{DEFAULTSORT:Kuhn, Franz Felix Adalbert 1812 births 1881 deaths People from Chojna German philologists People from the Province of Brandenburg German folklorists German male non-fiction writers Indo-Europeanists Linguists of Indo-European languages