Hirt, Hermann

Born Dec. 19, 1865, in Magdeburg; died Sept. 12, 1936, in Giessen. German linguist.

Hirt studied at the universities of Leipzig and Freiburg with such neogrammarians as K. Brugmann, A. Leskien, and E. Sievers. He became a professor at the University of Leipzig in 1896 and was a professor at the University of Giessen from 1912 to 1936. In his principal works, which dealt with Indo-European linguistics, Hirt studied Indo-European accent and vowel gradation. He was the author of Indo-Germanic Grammar (vols. 1–7, 1921–37), and he pursued research on the culture and original homeland of the Indo-European peoples. Some of Hirt’s ideas are open to question, such as his theories on vowel gradation and on the structure of roots.