Jost Trier German philologist Date of Birth: 15.12.1894 Country: Germany

Biography of Jost Trier

Jost Trier was a German philologist born on December 15, 1894, in Schlitzen, Hesse. He attended the University of Freiburg in 1914, where he studied German and Romance philology, as well as comparative linguistics. However, his studies were interrupted when he was mobilized into active military service in August 1914. During the First World War, Trier was captured by the French and became a prisoner of war. He participated in archaeological excavations in Algeria as a POW.

After the end of the war in 1918, Trier continued his education at the University of Marburg. In 1923, he defended his dissertation in Freiburg, which combined onomastic approaches with biographies of Catholic saints and the study of the history of their cults. In 1928, Trier completed his doctoral dissertation and published the results in his book, "Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes. Die Geschichte eines sprachliches Feldes. Von den Anfngen bis zum Beginn des 13. Jahrhunderts" (The German Lexicon in the Field of Understanding: The History of a Linguistic Field from Ancient Times to the Beginning of the 13th Century). This work, which was later reprinted in 1974, brought him widespread recognition.

Trier's work in this book contained the fundamental principles of the theory of semantic fields, which he considered his primary contribution to linguistics. His views closely aligned with those of Leo Weisgerber, whom Trier knew personally. A distinguishing feature of Trier's works was their orientation towards exhaustive descriptions of empirical material and a systematic reference to language history within his theory of "ergological etymology." This concept involved applying the methodology of semantic fields to study the etymology of designations for objects in traditional peasant life in Germany within the broad cultural context of the Middle Ages, and establishing metaphorical connections between these designations and a range of abstract lexemes.

In 1932, Trier became a professor at the University of Münster, which would be his academic home for the rest of his life. He served as the dean of the Faculty of Philology from 1935 to 1936 and as the rector of the University of Münster from 1956 to 1957. Trier was a member of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen and a laureate of the Conrad Duden Prize. He passed away on September 15, 1970, in Bad Salzuflen.