Karl Ferdinand Becker (14 April 1775

Lieser (Mosel) Lieser () is an ''Ortsgemeinde'' – a municipality belonging to a '' Verbandsgemeinde'', a kind of collective municipality – in the Bernkastel-Wittlich district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Geography Location Lieser belongs to the '' ...

– 4 September 1849

Offenbach am Main Offenbach am Main () is a List of cities and towns in Germany, city in Hesse, Germany, on the left bank of the river Main (river), Main. It borders Frankfurt and is part of the Frankfurt urban area and the larger Frankfurt Rhein-Main Regional Aut ...

) was a

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) ** Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...

physician A physician (American English), medical practitioner (Commonwealth English), medical doctor, or simply doctor, is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through th ...

educationalist Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty. Vari ...

, and

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 ...

. He wrote a

grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...

. His deductive approach to comparative philology was later discredited.

Biography

He was educated at

Hildesheim Hildesheim (; nds, Hilmessen, Hilmssen; la, Hildesia) is a city in Lower Saxony, Germany with 101,693 inhabitants. It is in the district of Hildesheim, about southeast of Hanover on the banks of the Innerste River, a small tributary of the L ...

, and then taught there from 1794 to 1799. He then studied medicine at the

University of Göttingen The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen, (german: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, known informally as Georgia Augusta) is a public research university in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Founded ...

, became a physician at Offenbach in 1815, and was a surgeon in the army. In 1823, he opened a small private school in Offenbach.

Philological research

His work as an instructor led him to make researches in philology, which for a time met with considerable recognition. His view was that all languages are subject to certain logical and philosophical principles, and that thus a science of comparative philology might be arrived at by a process of deduction. This method was later largely discredited by the investigations of

Jakob Grimm Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (4 January 1785 – 20 September 1863), also known as Ludwig Karl, was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist. He is known as the discoverer of Grimm's law of linguistics, the co-author of th ...

and others, whereby comparative philology is based on principles of history and ethnology and is attained inductively. Becker is also known for promoting the theory that there are only three

grammatical relation In linguistics, grammatical relations (also called grammatical functions, grammatical roles, or syntactic functions) are functional relationships between Constituent (linguistics), constituents in a clause. The standard examples of grammatical fun ...

s present in language (the predicative,

attributive In grammar, an attributive expression is a word or phrase within a noun phrase that modifies the head noun. It may be an: * attributive adjective * attributive noun * attributive verb or other part of speech, such as an attributive numeral. ...

and

objective Objective may refer to: * Objective (optics), an element in a camera or microscope * ''The Objective'', a 2008 science fiction horror film * Objective pronoun, a personal pronoun that is used as a grammatical object * Objective Productions, a Brit ...

relations), a theory which is still used by contemporary linguists.

Works

*''Deutsche Wortbildung'' (German word formation, Frankfurt 1824) *''Ausführliche deutsche Grammatik'' (A complete German grammar, 3 parts, 1836–39) *''Organismen der Sprache'' (2d ed., Prague 1841) *''Der deutsche Stil'' (German style, Prague 1848; 3d ed. revised by Lyon, 1884) His grammars and manuals on the German language went through many editions.

Literature

*W. Keith Percival. 2008. 'Josiah Gibbs (1790–1861): An echo of Karl Ferdinand Becker in the New World'. In: Lo van Driel & Theo Janssen (eds), ''Ontheven aan de tijd. Linguistic-historiografische studies voor Jan Noordegraaf bij zijn zestigste verjaardag''. Amsterdam: Stichting Neerlandistiek VU & Muenster: Nodus Publikationen, 161-170. ()

References

* This work in turn cites: ** Helmsdörfer, ''Becker der Grammatiker'' (Frankfort, 1854) * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Becker, Karl 1775 births 1849 deaths German philologists German military doctors 19th-century German physicians 18th-century German educators University of Göttingen alumni