Jacob Wackernagel


Jacob Wackernagel was a Swiss linguist, Indo-Europeanist and scholar of Sanskrit. He was born in Basel, son of the philologist Wilhelm Wackernagel.

Biography

Jacob Wackernagel was born on 11 December 1853 in Basel to Wilhelm Wackernagel, a Professor of German Language and Literature in Basel, and his second wife, Maria Salome. He was named after his godfather, Jacob Grimm of the Brothers Grimm. Jacob's father died when he was sixteen.
Wackernagel studied classical and Germanic philology and history at Basel, Göttingen and Leipzig ; he started a doctorate at Basel in 1875, writing his thesis on "the beginnings of the study of 'pathology' in the Greek grammarians". He defended that thesis in 1876, among his examiners were Nietzsche and Heyne. Wackernagel then spent a short time studying at Oxford and began lecturing as Privatdozent in Basel in the winter semester of 1876–1877. In 1879, at the age of 26, he became a successor of Friedrich Nietzsche as Professor of Greek.
He married Maria Stehlin, with whom he had eight children, in 1886. Two of their sons, Jakob and Hans Georg, became Basel professors.
In 1902 he was offered a chair of comparative philology in the University of Göttingen and was a Pro-Rector in 1912/13, but as a consequence of World War I he returned to Basel in 1915. In Basel, he was soon appointed to the chair of linguistics and classical philology, and he held this position until his retirement in 1936. He taught for sixty years. In 1918–1919, he briefly became a Rector of the University; he held this position before in 1890. Wackernagel died on 22 May 1938 at home in Basel.

Work

Wackernagel's major work is the Altindische Grammatik, a comprehensive grammar of Sanskrit.
He is best known among modern linguists and philologists for formulating Wackernagel's law, concerning the placement of unstressed words in syntactic second position in Indo-European clauses.
Another law named after him is Wackernagel's law of lengthening, also sometimes known as the law of lengthening in composition : in some compound words in Greek the first component ends with a vowel and the second component begins with a vowel; when neither vowel is high the first vowel is elided without effect and the second is replaced by its long counterpart.

''Lectures on Syntax''

Wackernagel read two courses in 1918–1919, while being a Rector, on "the elements of syntax with special reference to Greek, Latin and Germanic". Lectures notes were taken by two of his students. "First series" of lectures were published in 1920, it contained themes of "number, voice, tense, mood, and the non-finite forms of the verb". The book was successful, and in 1924 the "second series" were published "on gender, nouns and adjectives, pronouns, the article, prepositions, and negation". Second edition was published in 1926 and 1928. The book was translated into English by David Langslow in 2009. Andreas Willi of the University of Oxford praised both Wackernagel's work and Langslow's translation, writing "A hallmark feature of Wackernagel's Lectures is their accessible style, which makes them easy to read from cover to cover. Langslow impressively succeeds in preserving this feature: while not being slavish, his translation is both accurate and idiomatic."

Selected works

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