Hans Krahe
| Hans Krahe | |
|---|---|
| Born |
February 7, 1898 Gelsenkirchen |
| Died | June 25, 1965 (aged 67) |
| Nationality | German |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Philology and linguistics |
| Sub discipline | Illyrian languages |
| Institutions | University of Würzburg |
| Notable works | Die alten balkanillyrischen geographischen Namen, Lexikon altillyrischen Personennamen, Indogermanische Sprachwissenshaft |
Hans Krahe (7 February 1898 – 25 June 1965) was a German philologist and linguist, specializing over many decades in the Illyrian languages. He was born at Gelsenkirchen.
Between 1936 and 1946 he was a professor at the University of Würzburg, where he founded the Archiv für die Gewässernamen Deutschlands in 1942. Between 1947 and 1949 he held a chair at Heidelberg and from 1949 to the time of his death he was Professor für vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft und Slavistik and Leiter des indologischen und slavischen Seminars in the University of Tübingen.
Krahe in his work of 1937 as a follower of Pan-Illyrian theory, discussed the Venetic language known from hundreds of inscriptions as an Illyrian language which, with the lower Italian Messapian and the Balkan Illyrian languages, forms the separate Illyrian branch of the Indo-European language family. Krahe thought that not only the name of the Illyrian and Adriatic Enetoi peoples are the same. Homer mentions a people in Asia Minor, the Paphlagonians, as from the Enetai province, and a few hundred years later Herodotus refers to the Enetoi twice, once as Illyrian and again as the occupants of the Adriatic sea. Krahe thought that the name of the Illyrian and Adriatic Enetos peoples are the same, and if Adriatic Enetoi were Adriatic Veneti (Venets) and Venets were the Vistula Veneti (Veneds) mentioned in other sources then Illyrians and Veneds were the same people. The basis of this theory is the similarity of the proper nouns and place names, but most of all in the water names of the Baltic and the Adriatic (Odra, Drava, Drama, Drweca, Opawa, Notec, etc.). Having the model of Illyrian in mind he assumed that together these elements represented the remnant of one archaic language.
In his later work Krahe substituted Julius Pokorny's theory with that of Old European hydronymy, a network of names of water courses dating back to the Bronze Age and to a time before Indo-European languages had developed in central, northern and western Europe. In his 1949 essay Ortsnamen als Geschichtsquelle ("Placenames as sources for history") Krahe presented the analysis of hydronymy (river names) as a source of information both historical and prehistorical, with an extended analysis of the River Main as an example (Krahe 1949:17ff.)
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