Berthold Gustav Gottlieb Delbrück (26 July 1842 in Putbus auf Rügen - 3 January 1922 in Jena

Jena

Jena is a university city in central Germany on the river Saale. It has a population of approx. 103,000 and is the second largest city in the federal state of Thuringia, after Erfurt.-History:Jena was first mentioned in an 1182 document...

) was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 linguist who devoted himself to the study of the comparative syntax

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

 of the Indo-European languages

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...

.

Biography

Delbrück studied at the universities of Halle and Berlin

Humboldt University of Berlin

The Humboldt University of Berlin is Berlin's oldest university, founded in 1810 as the University of Berlin by the liberal Prussian educational reformer and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose university model has strongly influenced other European and Western universities...

, and was appointed professor of Sanskrit

Sanskrit

Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

 and comparative linguistics

Comparative linguistics

Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness....

 at the University of Jena in 1869 where he remained until 1912. In 1871 he published a study of the subjunctive

Subjunctive mood

In grammar, the subjunctive mood is a verb mood typically used in subordinate clauses to express various states of irreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred....

 and optative

Optative mood

The optative mood is a grammatical mood that indicates a wish or hope. It is similar to the cohortative mood, and closely related to the subjunctive mood....

 moods in Sanskrit and Greek, which was the first thoroughly methodical and complete treatment of a problem in comparative syntax. His great achievement, however, was preparing volumes iii, iv, and v on syntax entitled Vergleichende Syntax der indogermanischen Sprachen in Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (Outline of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages), published in Strassburg between 1893 and 1900 by Delbrück and Brugmann

Karl Brugmann

Karl Brugmann was a German linguist. He is a towering figure in Indo-European linguistics.-Biography:He was educated at Halle and Leipzig. He was instructor in the gymnasium at Wiesbaden and at Leipzig, and in 1872-77 was assistant at the Russian Institute of Classical Philology at the latter place...

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Works

Besides the works mentioned, he wrote:

• Grundfragen der Sprachforschung (1901)
• Einleitung in das Sprachstudium (3d ed., 1893; English trans., 1882)
• Syntaktische Forschungen, vols. i.-v. (1871-88)