Johannes Schmidt

Born July 29, 1843, in Prenzlau; died July 4,1901, in Berlin. German linguist.

Schmidt studied Indo-European languages at the universities of Berlin and Jena. He became a professor at the University of Graz in 1873 and at the University of Berlin in 1876. He was a specialist in comparative Indo-European linguistics. In place of A. Schleicher’s family tree model of the development of the Indo-European language family, Schmidt proposed the wave theory to account for the distribution of the Indo-European languages. According to this theory, Proto-Indo-European, while still united as a family of dialects, constituted an aggregate of linguistic innovations, which radiated like waves from the center of the linguistic unity toward its periphery. The Indo-European languages, according to Schmidt, are connected by a number of common features; they lack well-defined boundaries, and there are gradual and imperceptible transitions from one language to another.

Schmidt’s works had a considerable influence on the development of Indo-European dialectology. Schmidt became a foreign corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1892.