Hermann, Eduard

▪ German linguist

born Dec. 19, 1869, Coburg, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha [Germany]

died Feb. 14, 1950, Göttingen, W. Ger.

      German linguist who specialized in comparative studies of Indo-European languages and whose exhaustive linguistic exegesis of passages from Homer is a model of its kind: Sprachwissenschaftlicher Kommentar zu ausgewählten Stücken aus Homer (1914; “Linguistic Commentary on Selected Passages from Homer”).

      In 1931 Hermann published Lautgesetz und Analogie (“Sound Law and Analogy”), which discussed, in part, children's acquisition of language. He made a useful contribution to German historical linguistics in Herkunft unserer Fragefürwörter (1943; “Origin of Our Interrogative Pronouns”). He also did a significant follow-up study on sound change in a small Swiss village, Charmey. Hermann held professorships successively at the universities of Kiel, Frankfurt, and Göttingen and published papers on widely varying linguistic subjects.

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