Johann Arnold Kanne, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetJohann Arnold Kanne
German philologist
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Detmold, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
About Johann Arnold Kanne
- Johann Arnold Kanne (31 May 1773, Detmold – 17 December 1824, Erlangen) was a German philologist and linguist.
- In his writings, he used the pseudonyms Johannes Author, Walther Bergius and Anton von Preußen.Beginning in 1790, he studied theology and classical philology at the University of Göttingen, where he was a pupil of Christian Gottlob Heyne.
- Later on, he worked as schoolteacher in Halle an der Saale, Hersbruck and Leutenberg, and served as a soldier in both the Austrian and Prussian armies.
- In 1809, through mediation from author Jean Paul, he became an instructor of archaeology and history at the newly founded "Real Institute" in Nuremberg.
- In 1818 he was appointed professor of Oriental languages at the University of Erlangen.Kannes developed a method of "speculative etymology", in which he tried to find the one primordial mythology that decided all others.
- His method was an attempt to discover the so-called primordial language on which the primordial mythology was based.
- He postulated that language arose from "root words" for the divine based on the mystical dynamism of natural phenomena.
- He further postulated that since root words didn't change, all language evolved from them.
- He believed that he could reveal these root words by way of an etymology that merged the root words of all archaic languages.
- His derivation of a general theory of mythology from the etymological method, although scientifically unfounded, was an important influence to the early career of Jacob Grimm.
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