Background
Franz Felix Adalbert Kuhn was born at Konigsberg in Neumark (now Chojna, Poland) on the 19th of November 1812.
folklorist linguist philologist
Franz Felix Adalbert Kuhn was born at Konigsberg in Neumark (now Chojna, Poland) on the 19th of November 1812.
From 1841 Franz Felix Adalbert Kuhn was connected with the Kollnisches Gymnasium at Berlin, of which he was appointed director in 1870. Kuhn was the founder of a new school of comparative mythology, based upon comparative philology. Inspired by Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie, he first devoted himself to German stories and legends, and published Mdrkische Sagen und Marchen (1842), Norddeutsche Sagen, Marchen und Gebrduche (1848), and Sagen, Gebrduche und Marchen aus Westfalen (1859). But it is on his researches into the language and history of the Indo-Germanic peoples as a whole that his reputation is founded.
Franz Felix Adalbert Kuhn's chief works in this connexion are : Zur altesten Geschichte der Indogermanischen Volker (1845), in which he endeavoured to give an account of the earliest civilization of the Indo-Germanic peoples before their separation into different families, by comparing and analysing the original meaning of the words and stems common to the different languages; Die Herabkunft des Feuers und des Gottertranks (1859; new ed. by E. Kuhn, under title of Mythologische Studien, 1886); and Tiber Entwicklungsstufen der Mythenbildung (1873), in which he maintained that the origin of myths was to be looked for in the domain of language, and that their most essential factors were polyonymy and homonymy.