Schuchardt, Hugo

Born Feb. 4,1842, in Gotha; died Apr. 21,1927, in Graz. German and Austrian linguist.

Schuchardt studied at the universities of Jena and Berlin; he was a student of F. Diez’ and A. Schleicher’s. He became a professor in Halle in 1873 and was a professor in Graz from 1876 to 1900.

Schuchardt’s principal works deal with Romance philology and general linguistics. He studied Vulgar Latin, the Romance languages, and other Indo-European languages, as well as Basque, the Caucasian languages, the Hamito-Semitic languages, and Hungarian. Schuchardt propounded ideas on the mixing of languages, on ergative sentence constructions in several languages, and on the interaction of lexicon and grammar. He criticized the neogrammarians’ interpretation of the laws of sound changes and Schleicher’s genealogical classification of the Indo-European languages. A representative of the Wörter und Sachen trend, he believed that words should be studied in relation to the history of extralinguistic realia. Schuchardt’s views influenced several foreign schools of philology.