Background
Meinhof was born in Barzwitz near Rügenwalde in the Province of Pomerania.
Meinhof was born in Barzwitz near Rügenwalde in the Province of Pomerania.
He studied at the University of Tübingen and at the University of Greifswald.
In 1905 he became professor at the School of Oriental Studies in Berlin. In 1912, Carl Meinhof published Die Sprachen Der Hamiten (The Languages of the Hamites). He used the term Hamitic.
Meinhof"s system of classification of the Hamitic languages was based on a belief that "speakers of Hamitic became largely coterminous with cattle herding peoples with essentially Caucasian origins, intrinsically different from and superior to the "Negroes of Africa"." However, in the case of the so-called Nilo-Hamitic languages (a concept he introduced), it was based on the typological feature of gender and a "fallacious theory of language mixture." Meinhof did this in spite of earlier work by scholars such as Lepsius and Johnston demonstrating that the languages which he would later dub "Nilo-Hamitic" were in fact Nilotic languages with numerous similarities in vocabulary with other Nilotic languages.
On 5 May 1933 he became a member of the Nazi Party. Carl Meinhof was the great-uncle (the brother of the grandfather) of Ulrike Meinhof, a founding member of the German Red Army Faction (Royal Air Force), a left-wing militant group, which operated in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.