Hans Krahe

Who was Hans Krahe?

Hans Krahe was a German philologist and linguist, specializing over many decades in the Illyrian languages. He was born at Gelsenkirchen.

Between 1936 and 1946 he was a professor at the University of Würzburg, where he founded the Archiv für die Gewässernamen Deutschlands 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.

Krahe in his work of 1937 as a follower of Pan-Illyrian theory, discussed the Venetic language known from hundreds of inscriptions as an Illyrian language which, with the lower Italian Messapian and the Balkan Illyrian languages, forms the separate Illyrian branch of the Indo-European language family.