German philologist, born at Petershagen, near Minden, on the 5th of May 1833; studied at Göttingen, where he became professor of comparative philology in 1876; appointed to the same chair in Breslau in 1888. His studies were chiefly in the field of Indo-European origins. His principal work, Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der Indogermanischen Sprachen, originally published with a slightly different title in 1868, ran into a fourth edition in 1891. He also published scholarly editions of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, and of the poems of Hesiod.
