Otto Schrader (born 28 March 1855 in Weimar; died 21 March 1919 in Breslau) was a German philologist best known for his work on the history of German and Proto-Indo-European vocabulary dealing with various aspects of material culture, such as the names of domesticated plants and animals, the names of the metals, etc.

Education and early life

Schrader came from a civil servant family in Thuringia, attended Gymnasium in Weimar, and studied in Jena, Leipzig, and Berlin. When he received the Dr. phil. degree, in 1878 he received a teaching position at the Großherzogliches Gymnasium in Jena. There he received his habilitation in 1887 and in 1890 received the title of Professor. In 1909 he moved to Breslau, where he was an "ordentlicher Professor". In 1879 Schrader married Marie von Wilms, with whom he had four children. He described himself as a national liberal.

Support of Hehn's Theory

Schrader supported Victor Hehn's thesis that the Indo-Europeans were originally nomads. According to this thesis, they domesticated only the horse, which they ate. Since there are no common Indo-European words for donkey or camel, Schrader assumed that the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans was in the steppes north of the Black Sea, on the Caspian Sea, and on the Aral Sea, an area referred to as the Pontic–Caspian steppe, where wild horses were a native species. Schrader's theory would ultimately serve as the basis of Marija Gimbutas' Kurgan theory.

Publications

No complete list of Schrader's works has been compiled up to now, so the list below is incomplete.

Literature