Eduard Sievers (; 25 November 1850,

Lippoldsberg Wahlsburg was a municipality in the district of Kassel, in Hesse, Germany. It consisted of the two parts Lippoldsberg and Vernawahlshausen, and was located north of Kassel and northwest of Göttingen. On January 1, 2020, Wahlsburg merged with ...

– 30 March 1932,

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

) was a

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 ...

of the classical and

Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, Engli ...

. Sievers was one of the ''

Junggrammatiker The Neogrammarians (German: ''Junggrammatiker'', 'young grammarians') were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change. ...

'' of the so-called "Leipzig School". He was one of the most influential historical linguists of the late nineteenth century. He is known for his recovery of the poetic traditions of Germanic languages such as

Anglo-Saxon The Anglo-Saxons were a Cultural identity, cultural group who inhabited England in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to settlers who came to Britain from mainland Europe in the 5th century. However, the ethnogenesis of the Anglo- ...

and

Old Saxon Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, was a Germanic language and the earliest recorded form of Low German (spoken nowadays in Northern Germany, the northeastern Netherlands, southern Denmark, the Americas and parts of Eastern Europe). It i ...

, as well as for his discovery of

Sievers' law Sievers's law in Indo-European linguistics accounts for the pronunciation of a consonant cluster with a glide ( or ) before a vowel as it was affected by the phonetics of the preceding syllable. Specifically it refers to the alternation betwee ...

Biography

He was educated at

and

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

, and became professor extraordinarius of Germanic and

Romance Romance (from Vulgar Latin , "in the Roman language", i.e., "Latin") may refer to: Common meanings * Romance (love), emotional attraction towards another person and the courtship behaviors undertaken to express the feelings * Romance languages, ...

philology at

Jena Jena () is a German city and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 inhabitants, while the city itself has a popu ...

in 1871, receiving a full professorship there five years later. In 1883 he went to

Tübingen Tübingen (, , Swabian: ''Dibenga'') is a traditional university city in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, and developed on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer rivers. about one in thr ...

, and in 1887 to Halle, whence he was called in 1892 to

Sievers' analysis

Sievers' analysis was a system of five patterns which indicated how the poetic line (or, more specifically, the poetic

half-line In geometry, a line is an infinitely long object with no width, depth, or curvature. Thus, lines are one-dimensional objects, though they may exist in two, three, or higher dimension spaces. The word ''line'' may also refer to a line segmen ...

) was to be emphasized or not, e.g. stressed-unstressed-stressed-unstressed, unstressed-stressed-unstressed-stressed, etc. This seemingly elementary analysis was significant because of the difficulty experienced by previous scholars in identifying where the poetic line began and ended. Germanic poetry, in its written form, rarely indicated the line division. Moreover, even though it was clear that some words were of greater importance than others and were thus supposed to be stressed, there were few limitations on the length of the unstressed sequences, which made the identification of the poetic line even more difficult. In Shakespearean verse, for example, a typical poetic line is: ::''it IS the EAST and JUliET’s the SUN'' Here stressed and unstressed syllables follow one after the other. In Old Saxon, however, a line might read: ::''LIthi an thesaru LOGnu'' In this example, five syllables occur between the stressed syllables ''LI-'' and ''LOG''. Sievers examined these issues in great detail, as well as the questions of relative stress and clashing stresses in poetry. Sievers himself later abandoned this type of analysis in favor of '' Schallanalyse'', or 'sound analysis,' a system which was understood by very few apart from Sievers and those close to him.

Reception

His analysis was widely, though not universally, accepted among philologists. Sievers's work on the rhythms of Anglo-Saxon poetry influenced the poetry of

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...

, in particular in poems such as his version of ''The Seafarer'', an

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...

poem Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in ...

giving a first-person account of a man alone on the sea.

Works

Original

* ''An Old English Grammar'', translated and edited by Albert S. Cook (1885) * ''Der Heliand und die angelsächsische Genesis'' ("

Heliand The ''Heliand'' () is an epic poem in Old Saxon, written in the first half of the 9th century. The title means ''saviour'' in Old Saxon (cf. German and Dutch ''Heiland'' meaning "saviour"), and the poem is a Biblical paraphrase that recounts the ...

and the Anglo-Saxon version of

Genesis Genesis may refer to: Bible * Book of Genesis, the first book of the biblical scriptures of both Judaism and Christianity, describing the creation of the Earth and of mankind * Genesis creation narrative, the first several chapters of the Book of ...

, "1875) * ''Angelsächsische Grammatik'' ("Anglo-Saxon grammar," 3d ed. 1898) * ''Zum angelsächsischen Vokalismus'' ("Anglo-Saxon vowels," 1900) * ''Altgermanische Metrik'', Sammlung kurzer Grammatiken germanischer Dialekte. Ergänzungsreihe. 2 (Halle: Niemeyer, 1893) * ''Metrische Studien'', dealing with

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

metres ("Metrical studies," 1901–02) * ''Grundzüge der Phonetik'', once a standard work on

phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

("Foundations of phonetics," 5th ed. 1901)

Editor

Tatian Tatian of Adiabene, or Tatian the Syrian or Tatian the Assyrian, (; la, Tatianus; grc, Τατιανός; syc, ܛܛܝܢܘܣ; c. 120 – c. 180 AD) was an Assyrian Christian writer and theologian of the 2nd century. Tatian's most influential wor ...

(2d ed. 1892) *''

'' (1878) *''Die althochdeutschen Glossen'', with Elias von Steinmeyer ("Old high-German glosses," 4 vols., 1879–98) *''Oxforder Benediktinerregel'' ("Oxford

Benedictine , image = Medalla San Benito.PNG , caption = Design on the obverse side of the Saint Benedict Medal , abbreviation = OSB , formation = , motto = (English: 'Pray and Work') , foun ...

regulations," 1887) In 1891 he became an editor of

Paul Paul may refer to: *Paul (given name), a given name (includes a list of people with that name) *Paul (surname), a list of people People Christianity *Paul the Apostle (AD c.5–c.64/65), also known as Saul of Tarsus or Saint Paul, early Chris ...

and Braune's ''

Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur The ''Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur'' (English: ''Contributions to the History of the German Language and Literature'') is a German academic journal publishing articles on German language and literature. The particula ...

'' ("Contributions to the history of the German language and its literature"), and contributed sections on runes, Gothic language and literature, and Germanic metre to Paul's ''Grundriss der germanischen Philologie'' ("Outline of Germanic philology," Strassburg, 1891 et seq.).

References

Select bibliography

* Sievers Eduard.
Rhythmisch-melodische Studien
'. Geneva-Lausanne: sdvig press, 2014.

External links

* *

at www.catalogus-professorum-halensis.de (German language) {{DEFAULTSORT:Sievers, Eduard Linguists from Germany Anglo-Saxon studies scholars 1850 births 1932 deaths Germanic studies scholars Linguists of Germanic languages University of Jena faculty University of Tübingen faculty University of Halle faculty Leipzig University faculty Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy