Hermann Paul

Hermann Paul was a German linguist and one of the principal theorists of the Neogrammarian school of historical linguistics. In 1880 Paul published Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, or Principles of the History of Language, a systematic theoretical statement of Neogrammarian method that set out general laws of linguistic change, including sound change and analogy, and became one of the most influential works of nineteenth-century linguistic theory, going through multiple revised editions. Paul argued that the proper object of linguistic study was the individual speaker's mental language rather than an abstract collective language system, a position that later structuralist linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure would explicitly argue against. Paul also produced major work on the history and grammar of German, including a large historical grammar of the German language and a widely used German etymological dictionary, and he held a professorship at the University of Munich for the latter part of his career.