Hermann Hirt (19 December 1865 in

Magdeburg Magdeburg (; nds, label=Low Saxon, Meideborg ) is the capital and second-largest city of the German state Saxony-Anhalt. The city is situated at the Elbe river. Otto I, the first Holy Roman Emperor and founder of the Archdiocese of Magdebu ...

– 12 September 1936 in

Gießen Giessen, spelled Gießen in German (), is a town in the German state (''Bundesland'') of Hesse, capital of both the district of Giessen and the administrative region of Giessen. The population is approximately 90,000, with roughly 37,000 univers ...

) 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 ...

and

Indo-Europeanist Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. The goal of those engaged in these studies is to amass information about the hypothetical pro ...

Biography

Hirt wrote on German metres (''Untersuchungen zur westgermanischen Verskunst'', 1889), edited

Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer ( , ; 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work ''The World as Will and Representation'' (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the pr ...

's ''Parerga'' (1890), and then devoting himself to Indo-Germanic philology made special studies on accent, writing ''Der indogermanische Accent'' (1895) and ''Der indogermanische Ablaut, vornehmlich in seinem Verhältnis zur Betonung'' (1900). Hirt, who became professor at the

University of Leipzig Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 December ...

, made valuable contributions to Brugmann and Streitberg's ''Indogermanische Forschungen'', on the morphology of case endings. In 1902, he published ''Handbuch der griechischen Laut- und Formenlehre'', the first volume of a series of Indo-Germanic text-books of which he was editor. He is the author of the ''Indogermanische Grammatik'', published in seven volumes between 1921 and 1937. Hirt made foundational contributions to the study of

Proto-Indo-European language Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...

accent and

ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German '' Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...

Bibliography

* Hirt H (1895). ''Der indogermanische Akzent''. Strassburg:Trübner. * Hirt H (1900). ''Der indogermanische Ablaut, vornehmlich in seinem Verhältnis zur Betonung''. Strassburg: Trübner. * Hirt H (1902). ''Handbuch der griechischen Laut- und Formenlehre'' (2nd edn., 1912). Strassburg: Trübner. * Hirt H (1905–1907). ''Die Indogermanen. Ihre Verbreitung, ihre Heimat und ihre Kultur'' (2 vols). Strassburg: Trübner. * Hirt H (1909). ''Etymologie der neuhochdeutschen Sprache''. München: Beck (2nd edn., 1921). * Hirt H (1921–1937). ''Indogermanische Grammatik'' (7 vols). Heidelberg: Winter. * Hirt H (1931–1934). ''Handbuch des Urgermanischen'' (3 vols). Heidelberg: Winter. * Hirt H (1939). ''Hauptprobleme der indogermanischen Sprachwissenschaft. Hrsg. und bearbeitet von H. Arntz''. Halle: Niemeyer. * Hirt H (1940). ''Indogermanica. Forschungen über Sprache und Geschichte Alteuropas''. Halle: Niemeyer.

References

External links

Portrait at Titus Galeria
1865 births 1936 deaths Linguists from Germany Indo-Europeanists Linguists of Indo-European languages Linguists of Germanic languages Leipzig University faculty German philologists {{Germany-linguist-stub