The linguist who proved that the Albanian language belongs to the Indo-European family

The National History Museum commemorated the German linguist, researcher of Indo-European languages Gustav Meyer, one of the most important albanologists of his time, who proved that the Albanian language belongs to the Indo-European family.
In honor of his contribution to Albanian studies, a school in Tirana bears his name. Meyer is appreciated as the linguist who proved that the Albanian language belongs to the Indo-European family and is known for his long correspondence with Jeronim de Rada.
He was born in Groß Strehlitz in the Prussian province of Silesia (today Strzelce Opolskie in Poland). In 1867 he was enrolled at the University of Breslau (today the University of Wrocław) to study classical philology, Indo-European languages, modern Greek and Sanskrit. There he was influenced by the philologists Martin Hertz and Adolf Friedrich Stenzler. In 1871 he was appointed assistant professor at the University of Göttingen, and a year later professor of ancient languages there.
In 1877 he was appointed professor of Sanskrit and comparative linguistics at the University of Graz, where he continued his studies in ancient Greek, Turkish and Albanian and published his study “Contributions on the theory of word formation in Greek and Latin” (1872). There he focused on Albanology and published a number of works, such as: “Albanesische Studien, I” (1882); “Etymologisches Wörterbuch der albanesischen Sprache”, (1891); “Kurzgefasste albanesische Grammatik”, (1888) etc.
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