Hermann Möller

Hermann Möller (13 January 1850 in Hjerpsted, Denmark – 5 October 1923 in Copenhagen) was a Danish linguist noted for his work in favor of a genetic relationship between the Indo-European and Semitic language families and his version of the laryngeal theory.

Möller grew up in North Frisia after its conquest by Germany in the German–Danish War of 1864 and attended German universities (Pulsiano and Treharne 2001:447). He began teaching Germanic philology at the University of Copenhagen in 1883 and continued to do so for over thirty-five years (ib.). Also in 1883, he published Das altenglische Volksepos in der ursprünglichen strophischen Form, 'The Old English Folk Epic in the Original Strophic Form', in which he argued, among other things, that Beowulf had been composed in a fixed meter which was corrupted by later poets (ib.).

Möller's magnum opus was the Vergleichendes indogermanisch-semitisches Wörterbuch, 'Dictionary of Comparative Indo-European–Semitic', published in 1911.

Although Möller's association of Semitic and Indo-European reflected a high level of linguistic expertise and was the fruit of many years of labor, it did not receive general acceptance from the linguistic community and is rarely mentioned today.

It was, however, accepted as valid by a number of leading linguists of the time, such as Holger Pedersen (1924) and Louis Hjelmslev. According to Hjelmslev (1970:79), "a genetic relationship between Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic was demonstrated in detail by the Danish linguist Hermann Möller, using the method of element functions".

Möller's work was continued by Albert Cuny (1924, 1943, 1946) in France and more recently by the American scholar Saul Levin (1971, 1995, 2002).

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