Morphologische Untersuchungen Auf Dem Gebiete Der Indogermanischen Sprachen

Hermann Osthoff (18471909) and Karl Brugmann (18491919) were central figures in the circle of German scholars who rejected a doctrinal approach to the study of linguistics. They came to be known as the Neogrammarian school. At the core of their work was the theory that European languages together with a subset of languages found in central and southern Asia have a common origin in a single prehistoric language. They called this ancestor Indo-Germanic (known today as Indo-European) and claimed that its descendants are all related to one another by varying degrees of closeness. This six-volume elaboration of this thesis was published between 1878 and 1910. In Volume 3 (1880) Brugmann explains the rules for conjugation and focuses particularly on how the aorist tense in Greek Italian and Celtic is formed. He also gives an account of the vowels a e and o.