Curtius, Georg
One of the most distinguished classicists and philologists of the present century, born at
Lübeck, April 16th, 1820. He pursued his studies at Bonn and Berlin, teaching for a
time at the latter place and at Dresden. In 1849, he was made Professor Extraordinarius of
Classical Philology at Prague, becoming in 1851 Professor Ordinarius. From Prague he was
called in 1854 to a like chair at Kiel, and in 1862 to Leipzig. He died August 12th, 1885.
Curtius was the last and one of the greatest of the “old school” of
classical philologists, and formulated in their final expression their etymological views. He
was also profoundly learned in Greek, and in this department wrote a number of standard works:
the
Griechische Schulgrammatik (1852), which reached its fifteenth
(German) edition in 1882, and has been translated into English in Dr. W.
Smith's series in England, and forms the basis of Prof. Hadley's
Greek Grammar
in this country; also his
Erläuterungen to the foregoing
(1863,
3d ed. 1875) Eng. trans.
(1870); the
Grundzüge der
Griechischen Etymologie (1858; 5th ed. in collaboration with Windisch, 1879),
translated into English by Wilkins and England
(1875-76); and
Das
Verbum der Griechischen Sprache (1873-76)—a very elaborate piece of
work—translated by Wilkins and England
(1880). Besides these important
publications, he also put forth a treatise
De Nominum Graecorum
Formatione (1842);
Die Sprachvergleichung in ihrem
Verhältniss zur klassischen Philologie (1845);
Sprachvergleichende Beiträge zur griechischen und lateinischen
Grammatik (1846);
Philologie und Sprachwissenschaft
(1862);
Zur Chronologie der indo-germanischen Sprachforschung
(1867; 2d ed. 1873);
Zur Kritik der neuesten Sprachforschung
(1885); and in conjunction with Brugmann, G. Meyer, Fick, Windisch, and others,
Studien zur griech. und lat. Grammatik, 10 vols.
(1868-77). The
ninth volume of this series contains Brugmann's famous paper on the nasal sonant, with which
began the aggressive propaganda of the new school against the theories of Curtius and his
predecessors. The new theories form the subject of a vigorous attack by Curtius himself in the
Kritik mentioned above, in which he maintains the principle of
“sporadic change” in addition to invariable phonetic law and the influence
of analogy. (See
Philologia.) In 1878, Prof.
Curtius founded with Lange, Ribbeck, and Lipsius the
Leipziger Studien zur klassischen
Philologie.
