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.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".It was doubtless thanks to Möller's work that Holger Pedersen included Hamito-Semitic in his proposed Nostratic language family, a classification maintained by subsequent Nostraticists (e.g. Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky).The American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard began his career with work in the tradition of Möller and Cuny, initially comparing Indo-European and Semitic (1975).In 1878, Ferdinand de Saussure, then a 21-year-old student at the University of Leipzig, published his Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes, 'Dissertation on the original system of vowels in the Indo-European languages', the work that founded the laryngeal theory.