Hans Krahe

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Hans Krahe (7 February 1898 – 25 June 1965) was a German philologist and linguist, specializing over many decades in the Illyrian languages. Between 1936 and 1946 he was a professor at the University of Würzburg, where he founded the Archiv für die Gewässernamen Deutschlands^[1] in 1942. Between 1947 and 1949 he held a chair at Heidelberg and from 1949 to the time of his death he was Professor für vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft und Slavistik and Leiter des indologischen und slavischen Seminars in the University of Tübingen.

In his 1949 essay Ortsnamen als Geschichtsquelle ("Placenames as sources for history") Krahe presented the analysis of hydronymy (river names) as a source of information both historical and prehistorical, with an extended analysis of the River Main as an example (Krahe 1949:17ff.) His assumption that the linguistic strata corresponded to ethic strata came under critical reappraisal decades after his death, in the work of Walter Pohl and others.

[edit] Notes

[edit] Publications

In addition to his numerous articles, Krahe published:

• Die alten balkanillyrischen geographischen Namen (Heidelberg 1925). His first book.
• Lexikon altillyrischen Personennamen (1929).
• Indogermanische Sprachwissenshaft (Berlin 1948)
• Ortsnamen als Geschichtsquelle (Heidelberg 1949)
• Die Sprache der Illyrier I. Die Quellen (1955). ISBN 3-447-00534-3 A summary of his previous work. Volume II. Die messapischen Inschriften und ihre Chronologie is by Carlo de Simone and Volume III. Die messapischen Personennamen by Jürgen Untermann. (Wiesbaden 1964). ISBN 3-447-00535-1
• Die Strukture der alteuropäischen Hydronomie (Wisbaden 1963).
• Unsere ältesten Flussnamen (1964).
• Germanische Sprachwissenschaft. Wortbildungslehre. (Berlin 1969).

[edit] See also

• Old European hydronymy