Adolf Tobler

Adolf Tobler (24 May 1835 to 18 March 1910) was a Swiss-German linguist and philologist, born in Hirzel in the canton of Zürich and brother of the linguist Ludwig Tobler. He studied Romance philology at the universities of Zürich and Bonn, receiving his doctorate in 1857, and at Bonn was influenced by Friedrich Christian Diez and Nicolaus Delius. He then worked as a schoolteacher at the Solothurn cantonal school and at the gymnasium in Bern, and in 1867 moved to the University of Berlin, where he held the chair of Romance philology from 1871 until his death and served as university rector in 1890 and 1891. The Tobler-Mussafia law, a grammatical rule for Romance languages, is named after him and the Austrian philologist Adolf Mussafia. His works include the five-volume Vermischte Beiträge zur französischen Grammatik (1886 to 1912), and his Old French dictionary was unfinished at his death and was edited and published by Erhard Lommatzsch as the eleven-volume Tobler-Lommatzsch Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch. He died in Berlin.