Jacob Wackernagel

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Jacob Wackernagel (also Jakob, 1853–1938) was an Indo-Europeanist and scholar of Sanskrit. He was born in Basel, son to the philologist Wilhelm Wackernagel.

He studied Classical and Germanic philology and history in Göttingen and Leipzig, and taught at Basel University, from 1879 as professor for Greek, as the successor of Friedrich Nietzsche. 1902 he was called to Georgia Augusta Göttingen University, but as a consequence of World War I, he returned to Basel in 1915. He retired in 1936, and died on 22 May 1938 in Basel.

Wackernagel's major work is the Altindische Grammatik, a comprehensive grammar of the Sanskrit language. He is best known among modern linguists and philologists for formulating "Wackernagel's Law", concerning the placement of unstressed words in "second position" in Indo-European sentences (1892, "Über ein Gesetz der indogermanischen Wortstellung", Indogermanische Forschungen 1, pp. 333–436).