Diez

Diez, FRIEDRICH CHRISTIAN, the greatest of Romance philologists, was born at Giessen, 15th March 1794, and educated at Giessen and Göttingen, with one short interval in 1813 of campaigning as a volunteer. In April 1818 he saw Goethe at Jena, and was directed by the sage to the lectures of Raynouard and the study of the Provençal tongue. From 1822 he lived at Bonn as a privat-docent, and in 1830 was there appointed professor of the Romance Languages, and there he died, May 29, 1876. His first work, Altspan. Romanzen (1821), was followed by a series of valuable works on the Romance languages, of which the greatest are his Grammatik der Romanischen Sprachen (3 vols. 1836-38; 5th ed. 1882), and the Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Romanischen Sprachen (2 vols. 1853; 5th ed. by A. Scheler, 1887; Eng. trans. 1864). These works discussed these languages for the first time from the comparative historical standpoint, and thus formed a sound foundation for all subsequent Romance philology. See the books on Diez, his life and work, by Sachs (1878), Breyermann (1878), and Stengel (1883-94).