Johan Ihre (3 March 1707 – 1 December 1780) was a

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

philologist and historical linguist.

Life

Ihre was born in

Lund Lund (, ;"Lund"
(US) and ) is a city in the provinces of Sweden, province of Scania, southern Swed ...

, 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 In Christian denominations, an archbishop is a bishop of higher rank or office. In most cases, such as the Catholic Church, there are many archbishops who either have jurisdiction over an ecclesiastical province in addition to their own archdi ...

Mattias Stechius in

Uppsala Uppsala ( ; ; archaically spelled ''Upsala'') is the capital 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 inhabitants in 2019. Loc ...

, and studied at

Uppsala University Uppsala University (UU) () is a public university, public research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded in 1477, it is the List of universities in Sweden, oldest university in Sweden and the Nordic countries still in operation. Initially fou ...

, where he completed his '' magister'' degree in 1730. In 1730-1733 he studied abroad, in

Oxford Oxford () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and non-metropolitan district in Oxfordshire, England, of which it is the county town. The city is home to the University of Oxford, the List of oldest universities in continuou ...

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

and

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

. He was in 1734 appointed

docent The term "docent" is derived from the Latin word , which is the third-person plural present active indicative of ('to teach, to lecture'). Becoming a docent is often referred to as habilitation or doctor of science and is an academic qualifi ...

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 Royal may refer to: People * Royal (name), a list of people with either the surname or given name * A member of a royal family or royalty Places United States * Royal, Arkansas, an unincorporated community * Royal, Illinois, a village * Ro ...

in Uppsala.

Works

Ihre was the first scholar to recognize the

sound change In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chan ...

of the

Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages, 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 spoke ...

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 formulated Grimm's law of linguistics, and was the co-author of the '' Deuts ...

and now known after the latter as

Grimm's law Grimm's law, also known as the First Germanic Consonant Shift or 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 first millennium BC, first d ...

. In 1737 the German philologist Johann Georg Wachter (1663–1757) published an

etymological Etymology ( ) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time. In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. ...

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

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 that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical effects on both the s ...

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 Odin (; from ) is a widely revered god in Norse mythology and Germanic paganism. Most surviving information on Odin comes from Norse mythology, but he figures prominently in the recorded history of Northern Europe. This includes the Roman Em ...

. Ihre was also the first to demonstrate that the text of the ''

Codex argenteus The (Latin for "Silver Book/Codex") is a 6th century, 6th-century illuminated manuscript, originally containing Gospel#Canonical gospels, part of the Gothic Bible, 4th-century translation of the Christian Bible into the Gothic language. Trad ...

'' manuscript in the Uppsala University Library is identical to the Gothic Bible translation by Bishop

Wulfila Ulfilas (; – 383), known also as Wulfila(s) or Urphilas, was a 4th-century Gothic preacher of Cappadocian Greek descent. He was the apostle to the Gothic people. Ulfila served as a bishop and missionary, participated in the Arian controver ...

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 Academic staff of Uppsala University Uppsala University alumni Swedish philologists Linguists from Sweden Historical linguists Age of Liberty people 18th-century Swedish scientists Swedish librarians People from Lund