Rasmus Rask

Rasmus Rask was a Danish linguist and philologist regarded as one of the founders of comparative and historical linguistics. In a prize essay written in 1814 and published in 1818 as an investigation into the origin of the Old Norse language, Rask traced systematic correspondences between sounds in Old Norse, Latin, Greek and other languages, identifying regular consonant shifts between Germanic and other Indo-European languages several years before Jacob Grimm formalized the same pattern as what became known as Grimm's Law. Rask argued that grammatical structure, rather than vocabulary alone, was the most reliable evidence for establishing that languages were related, a methodological principle that became foundational to the comparative method in linguistics. Rask was also an exceptionally prolific linguist by the standards of his era, producing grammars and studies of languages including Icelandic, Old English, Frisian, Spanish and Sinhalese, and he traveled extensively through Russia, Persia and India in the course of his research.