Jacob Wackernagel

Who was Jacob Wackernagel?

Jacob Wackernagel was a Swiss linguist, Indo-Europeanist and scholar of Sanskrit. He was born in Basel, son of the philologist Wilhelm Wackernagel.

He studied classical and Germanic philology and history in Göttingen and Leipzig, and taught at the University of Basel from 1879 onwards as professor of Greek, as the successor of Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1902 he was called to the University of Göttingen, but as a consequence of World War I he returned to Basel in 1915. He retired in 1936, and died on 22 May 1938 in Basel.

Wackernagel's major work is the Altindische Grammatik, a comprehensive grammar of Sanskrit.

He is best known among modern linguists and philologists for formulating Wackernagel's law, concerning the placement of unstressed words in syntactic second position in Indo-European clauses.

Another law named after him is Wackernagel's law of lengthening, also known as the Law of lengthening in composition: in some compound words in Greek the first ingredient ends with a vowel and the second ingredient begins with a vowel; when neither vowel is high the first vowel is without effect and the second is replaced by its long counterpart.