XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

He lost his parents early and was in charge of his uncle. He was educated at Bonn and at Jena where he studied philology (historical linguistics) with August Schleicher and specialized in Indo-European, especially Slavic, languages. He earned a doctorate in 1865 and worked from 1866 as a teacher at a gymnasium in Berlin.

In 1868 Schmidt was invited by the University of Bonn to take a position as professor of German and Slavic languages. In Bonn he published the work Die Verwandtschaftsverhältnisse der indogermanischen Sprachen ('The Relationships of the Indo-Germanic Languages', 1872), which presented his Wellentheorie ('wave theory'). In the same year he published his little Sanskrit anthology. In Bonn, he made a habit of giving separate large courses on the grammar of Greek, Latin, Gothic, Lithuanian, Old Slavonic, and Sanskrit, which he continued to follow. Next, he tirelessly worked on his well-known voluminous work "Zur Geschichte des indogermanischen Vokalismus" (2 hours, 1871-1875), devoted to the consideration of his Armenian, Albanian and Celtic, which at that time were almost not involved in comparison. The great erudition shown by Shmidt in this work brought him wide fame. For Slavic linguistics, the second part of the book was of particular importance, to a large extent devoted to the issue of consensus and related phenomena.

According to the wave theory, new features of a language spread from a central point in continuously weakening concentric circles, similar to the waves created when a stone is thrown into a body of water. This should lead to convergence among dissimilar languages. The theory was directed against the doctrine of sound laws introduced by the Neogrammarians in 1870.

From 1873 to 1876 Schmidt was a professor of philology at the University of Graz in Austria. In 1876 he returned to Berlin, where he worked as a professor at Humboldt University.

Shmidt's recent works are less significant and, still testifying to the profound erudition of his author, are unsuccessful and poor in their basic ideas. In 1890, a study appeared: "Die Urheimat der Indogermanen und das europä ische Zahlsystem". Based on the witty and subtle analysis of the Indo-European numerals, which gave a number of interesting and valuable private remarks, Shmidt proved that the traces of the six-digit count in the Indo-European numerals indicated by him undoubtedly indicate the location of the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans in Asia, near Babylon, where it was also in use hexadecimal count. In 1895, Shmidt's latest larger work appeared: "Zur Kritik der Son a ntentheorie", representing a number of interesting details, but unsuccessful and unconvincing, both in criticizing the generally accepted theory of "sonants" created by Brugman and Osthoff, and in the author of his own theory, which had to replace the Sonant.

Shmidt died on July 4, 1901, a few days after the 25th anniversary of his professorship at the University of Berlin. But in the development of scientific material in depth and thoroughness, caution and criticality of research, the wealth of erudition and the rigor of the method, he undoubtedly belongs to one of the first places among linguistic scholars of the last quarter of the 19th century.

Список интернет-ресурсов

http://www.vehi.net/brokgauz/all/116/116337.shtml

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Schmidt_(linguist)

https://www.multitran.com/

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ru/