About: Ferdinand Sommer

Ferdinand Sommer (4 May 1875, in Trier – 3 April 1962, in Munich) was a German classical and Indo-European philologist. From 1893 he studied at the universities of Marburg and Freiberg, where he was a pupil of Rudolf Thurneysen. In 1899 he obtained his habilitation from the University of Leipzig with the thesis Die Komparationssuffixe im Lateinischen (Comparative suffixes of Latin). In 1902 he was named professor of Indo-European linguistics, Sanskrit and classical philology at the University of Basel, and later on in his career, he held professorships in Indo-European linguistics at the universities of Rostock (1909–13), Jena (1913–24) and Bonn (1924–26). From 1926 to 1951 he was a professor of comparative linguistics at the University of Munich.