Zeuss, Johann Kaspar

Born July 22, 1806, in Vogtendorf, Bavaria; died there Nov. 10, 1856. German philologist and historian.

Zeuss studied at the University of Munich. His early works dealt with the history of Germanic philology, and he went on to investigate the linguistic relations between the Germanic tribes and the Celts. A founder of Celtic studies, Zeuss devoted his principal works to the study of Celtic-language texts and their linguistic features and chronology. He systematized previously accumulated information on the Celtic languages, relying in particular on the work of F. Bopp and A. Pictet, who had established that the Celtic languages are Indo-European. Zeuss compiled the first comparative-historical grammar of the Celtic languages; it was an exemplary work for its time.