Hermann Möller


Hermann Möller was a Danish linguist noted for his work in favor of a genetic relationship between the Indo-European and Semitic language families and his version of the laryngeal theory.
Möller grew up in North Frisia after its conquest by Germany in the German–Danish War of 1864 and attended German universities. He began teaching Germanic philology at the University of Copenhagen in 1883 and continued to do so for over thirty-five years. Also in 1883, he published Das altenglische Volksepos in der ursprünglichen strophischen Form, 'The Old English Folk Epic in the Original Strophic Form', in which he argued, among other things, that Beowulf had been composed in a fixed meter which was corrupted by later poets.

Indo-European and Semitic

Möller's magnum opus was the Vergleichendes indogermanisch-semitisches Wörterbuch, 'Dictionary of Comparative Indo-European–Semitic', published in 1911.
Although Möller's association of Semitic and Indo-European reflected a high level of linguistic expertise and was the fruit of many years of labor, it did not receive general acceptance from the linguistic community and is rarely mentioned today.
It was, however, accepted as valid by a number of leading linguists of the time, such as Holger Pedersen and Louis Hjelmslev. According to Hjelmslev, "a genetic relationship between Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic was demonstrated in detail by the Danish linguist Hermann Möller, using the method of element functions".
Möller's work was continued by Albert Cuny in France and more recently by the American scholar Saul Levin.
It was doubtless thanks to Möller's work that Holger Pedersen included Hamito-Semitic in his proposed Nostratic language family, a classification maintained by subsequent Nostraticists. The Hamitic family was shown to be invalid by Joseph Greenberg, who consequently rejected the name Hamito-Semitic, replacing it with Afroasiatic, under which Semitic is classed today, along with some but not all of the languages formerly classed as Hamitic.
The American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard began his career with work in the tradition of Möller and Cuny, initially comparing Indo-European and Semitic. He subsequently broadened the base to include Afroasiatic in general, an approach found in his first major work, Toward Proto-Nostratic: A New Approach to the Comparison of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afroasiatic. He later expanded his comparisons to include other language families, such as Uralic and Kartvelian.
In carrying out his Indo-European–Semitic comparison, Möller produced a reconstruction of Proto-Semitic of hitherto unparalleled sophistication. According to Edgar Sturtevant :

The laryngeal theory

Möller is also well known for his contributions to the laryngeal theory.
In 1878, Ferdinand de Saussure, then a 21-year-old student at the University of Leipzig, published his Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes, 'Dissertation on the original system of vowels in the Indo-European languages', the work that founded the laryngeal theory. According to Saussure, Indo-European had had two "sonantic coefficients", vanished sounds that had two properties: they lengthened a preceding vowel; one of them gave the vowel e or a timbre, while the other gave the vowel o timbre.
Saussure's argument was not accepted by any of the Neogrammarians, the school, primarily based at the University of Leipzig, then reigning at the cutting-edge of Indo-European linguistics. Several of them attacked the Mémoire savagely. Osthoff's criticism was particularly virulent, often descending into personal invective. One of the few scholars to come to Saussure's defense was Möller, beginning in an article in 1880 – a defense which earned him Osthoff's scorn as well.
Möller offered several refinements over Saussure's original version of the theory:
For the first half-century of its existence, the laryngeal theory was widely seen as "an eccentric fancy of outsiders". "In Germany it was totally rejected". In 1927, the Polish linguist Jerzy Kuryłowicz announced that Hittite ḫ was found in two of the positions predicted for a "laryngeal" by the Saussure–Möller theory. The evidence was crushing, overwhelming. As a result, the laryngeal theory is generally accepted today in one form or another, although scholars who deal with the theory disagree on the number of laryngeals to be accepted, with most positing three or four, but some positing as few as one or as many as thirteen.
In Oswald Szemerényi's appreciation, although "Saussure is the founder of modern views on the IE vowel system", "the true founder of the laryngeal theory is the Danish scholar Möller."

Works cited