Johan Ihre (3 March 1707 – 1 December 1780) was a Swedish philologist and historical linguist.

Life

Ihre was born in Lund, son of the theologian Thomas Ihre and his spouse Brita Steuchia. After his father's death in 1720, Johan Ihre was raised in the house of his grandfather Archbishop

Mattias Stechius Mattias is a masculine given name found most prominently in Northern Europe. It is a cognate of Matthew and Matthias, and may refer to: Sports * Mattias Adelstam (born 1982), Swedish footballer * Mattias Asper (born 1974), Swedish goalkeeper ...

Uppsala Uppsala (, or all ending in , ; archaically spelled ''Upsala'') is the county seat of Uppsala County and the List of urban areas in Sweden by population, fourth-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. It had 177,074 inha ...

, and studied at

Uppsala University Uppsala University ( sv, Uppsala universitet) is a public research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded in 1477, it is the oldest university in Sweden and the Nordic countries still in operation. The university rose to significance durin ...

, where he completed his ''

magister Magister is Latin for "master" or "teacher". It may refer to: Positions and titles * Magister degree, an academic degree * Magister equitum, or Master of the Horse * Magister militum, a master of the soldiers * Magister officiorum (''master of o ...

'' degree in 1730. In 1730-1733 he studied abroad, in

Oxford Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the Un ...

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

and

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. ...

. He was in 1734 appointed

docent The title of docent is conferred by some European universities to denote a specific academic appointment within a set structure of academic ranks at or below the full professor rank, similar to a British readership, a French " ''maître de con ...

in Uppsala, 1735 librarian at the University Library, and was from 1737 until his death holder of the Skyttean professorship in Eloquence and Government. He became a member of the Royal Academy of Letters in 1755. He was secretary of the

Royal Swedish Society of Sciences The Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala ( sv, Kungliga Vetenskaps-Societeten i Uppsala), is the oldest of the royal academies in Sweden, having been founded in 1710. The society has, by royal decree of 1906, 50 Swedish fellows and 100 foreign. ...

in Uppsala.

Works

Ihre was the first scholar to recognize the sound change of the

Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, ...

that was later to be elaborated on by

Rasmus Christian Rask Rasmus Kristian Rask (; born Rasmus Christian Nielsen Rasch; 22 November 1787 – 14 November 1832) was a Danish linguist and philologist. He wrote several grammars and worked on comparative phonology and morphology. Rask traveled extensively to ...

and

Jakob Grimm Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (4 January 1785 – 20 September 1863), also known as Ludwig Karl, was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist. He is known as the discoverer of Grimm's law of linguistics, the co-author of the ...

and now known after the latter as

Grimm's law Grimm's law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift) is a set of sound laws describing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC. First systematically put forward by Jacob Gri ...

. In 1737 the German philologist

Johann Georg Wachter Johann, typically a male given name, is the German form of ''Iohannes'', which is the Latin form of the Greek name ''Iōánnēs'' (), itself derived from Hebrew name ''Yochanan'' () in turn from its extended form (), meaning " Yahweh is Gracio ...

(1663–1757) published an

etymological Etymology () The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p. 633 "Etymology /ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ the study of the class in words and the way their meanings have changed throughout time". is the study of the history of the form of words an ...

dictionary of the German language, ''Glossarium Germanicum''. This book had a great influence on Johan Ihre: in 1769 he published, along the same lines as Wachter's work, a Swedish etymological dictionary.Two Pre-Modern Etymologists: The Connections between Johann Georg Wachter (1663–1757) and Johan Ihre (1707–1780)
By Krister Östlund. ''Language & History'' (November 2010), 53 (2), pg. 127-137. Ihre's etymological dictionary of Swedish demonstrated the origin of words in

Old Swedish Old Swedish ( Modern Swedish: ) is the name for two distinct stages of the Swedish language that were spoken in the Middle Ages: Early Old Swedish (), spoken from about 1225 until about 1375, and Late Old Swedish (), spoken from about 1375 unti ...

forms and compared them to

cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical e ...

s in other languages. Ihre thought, in accordance with the historical speculations common at the time and derived from Icelandic sources, that the language had been brought to the Nordic countries by Odin. Ihre was also the first to demonstrate that the text of the ''

Codex argenteus The Codex Argenteus (Latin for "Silver Book/Codex") is a 6th-century illuminated manuscript, originally containing part of the 4th-century translation of the Christian Bible into the Gothic language. Traditionally ascribed to the Arian bi ...

'' manuscript in the Uppsala University Library is identical to the

Gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...

Bible translation by Bishop

Wulfila Ulfilas (–383), also spelled Ulphilas and Orphila, all Latinized forms of the unattested Gothic form *𐍅𐌿𐌻𐍆𐌹𐌻𐌰 Wulfila, literally "Little Wolf", was a Goth of Cappadocian Greek descent who served as a bishop and missionar ...

Selected bibliography of Ihre's works

*''Utkast till föreläsningar öfwer swenska språket'', 1745 *''Fragmenta versonis Ulphilanae, continentia particulas''..., 1763 *''Swenskt dialect lexicon'', 1766 *''Anmärkningar, rörande Codex argenteus i Upsala'', 1767 *''Analecta Ulphilana'', 1767-1769 *''Glossarium Suiogothicum'', 1769 *''Scripta versionem Ulphilanam et linguam Moeso-Gothicam illustrantia'', 1773

Notes and references

External links

Ihre's archive at Uppsala University Library
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ihre, Johan 1707 births 1780 deaths Uppsala University faculty Uppsala University alumni Swedish philologists Linguists from Sweden Historical linguists Age of Liberty people 18th-century Swedish scientists Swedish librarians