Rudolf Thurneysen

Eduard Rudolf Thurneysen (14 March 1857 to 9 August 1940) was a Swiss linguist and Celticist. Born in Basel, he studied classical philology in Basel, Leipzig, Berlin and Paris, with teachers including Ernst Windisch and Heinrich Zimmer, received his promotion, roughly a doctorate, in 1879 and his habilitation, in Latin and the Celtic languages, at the University of Jena in 1882. He taught Latin at Jena from 1885 to 1887 and then took the Chair of Comparative Philology at the University of Freiburg, replacing the Indo-European specialist Karl Brugmann. In 1896 he posited Thurneysen's law, a sound law concerning the alternation of voiced and voiceless fricatives in certain affixes in Gothic, published in 1898. His Handbuch des Alt-Irischen of 1909, translated into English as A Grammar of Old Irish, was still in print in 2006, and a Welsh version appeared in 1935. He moved to the University of Bonn in 1913, where he was called the greatest living authority on Old Irish, retired in 1923 and died in Bonn in 1940. The Rudolf Thurneysen Memorial Lecture at Bonn is named in his honour.