Curtius

Curtius, GEORG, a distinguished classical scholar, the brother of the preceding, was born at Lübeck, April 16, 1820, and studied at Bonn and Berlin. After teaching some time at Dresden and Berlin, he became in 1849 extraordinary, in 1851 ordinary, professor of Classical Philology at Prague, and settled as such at Kiel in 1854, at Leipzig in 1862. He died August 12, 1885. One of the soundest Greek scholars in Germany, Curtius was the first philologist of the generation that succeeded the giants Bopp and Benfey. His most important works were Griechische Schulgrammatik (1852; 20th ed. 1890), translated into many languages (into English in Dr Smith's series in 1863); next the Erläuterungen to the foregoing (1863; 3d ed. 1875), translated into English by Abbott in 1870; Grundzüge der Griechischen Etymologie (1858; 5th ed., with the collaboration of A. Windisch, 1879), translated into English by A. S. Wilkins and E. B. England, 1875-76; and Das Verbum der Griechischen Sprache (1873-76; 2d ed. 1877-80), translated by Wilkins and England, 1880. Other works were De Nominum Græcorum Formatione (1842), Die Sprachvergleichung in ihrem Verhältniss zur Klassischen Philologie (1845), Sprachvergleichende Beiträge zur Griechischen und Lateinischen Grammatik (1846), Philologie und Sprachwissenschaft (1862), Zur Chronologie der Indogermanischen Sprachforschung (1867; 2d ed. 1873), and Zur Kritik der neuesten Sprachforschung (1885), his last work, in which he vigorously assails the theories of the 'new grammarians,' and to explain the word-changes in a language maintains the necessity of a third principle of varying or sporadic change, in addition to invariable phonetic law and the operation of analogy. In the famous Studien zur Griech. und Lat. Grammatik (10 vols. Leip. 1868-77) Curtius united his own papers with those of his pupils and others, including Brugmann, Fick, G. Meyer, and Windisch. The ninth volume contained Brugmann's famous paper on the 'nasalis sonans,' which first marked the revolt of the 'neogrammatici' against the master and traditional philology. Curtius founded in 1878, with L. Lange, O. Ribbeck, and H. Lipsius, the Leipziger Studien zur Klassischen Philologie.