born March 10, 1772, Hannover, Hanover
died Jan. 12, 1829, Dresden, Saxony
German writer and critic.
He contributed many of his projects and theories to journals such as Athenäum (1798–1800), the quarterly he and his brother Concerning the Language and Wisdom of India (1808), a pioneering attempt at comparative Indo-European linguistics and the starting point of the study of Indo-Aryan languages and comparative philology. His conception of a universal, historical, and comparative literary scholarship has been profoundly influential, and he is regarded as the originator of many of the philosophical ideas that inspired early German {{link=Romanticism">Romanticism .