Rasmus Rask

Born Rasmus Christian Nielsen Rasch in Denmark in 1787, Rask made his mark early by traveling to Iceland and producing the first grammar of Icelandic. In 1818, he identified the systematic consonant variations between Germanic and other Indo-European languages, a discovery that became the foundation of what Jacob Grimm would formalize in 1822 as Grimm's Law. Rask pushed further, journeying to Russia, Persia, India, and Ceylon to study languages in their native ground. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1829, and shortly before his death in 1832, the University of Copenhagen appointed him professor of Eastern languages. He died at forty-four, having built the scaffolding of comparative linguistics but rarely getting the credit in the naming.