Karl Brugmann

Karl Brugmann was a German linguist and the leading figure among the Neogrammarians, a school of comparative philologists centered at Leipzig in the late nineteenth century. Brugmann and his Neogrammarian colleagues advanced the principle that sound changes operate as exceptionless mechanical laws within a given language and time period, a stricter standard of rigor than earlier comparative philology had applied, and any apparent exception was to be explained by another regular process such as analogy. With Berthold Delbruck, Brugmann co-authored the multi-volume Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, an outline of comparative Indo-European grammar that became a standard reference work in the field for decades. Brugmann also proposed what is now called Brugmann's law, concerning the development of certain vowels in Sanskrit from Indo-European long vowels in open syllables, and he held professorships at Freiburg and later Leipzig, where he continued to shape the field's methodology.