The New International Encyclopædia/Sievers, Eduard

SIEVERS, zē'vẽrs, Eduard (1850—). A German philologist, born at Lippoldsberg, Prussia. He was educated at Leipzig and Berlin, and became professor extraordinarius of Germanic and Romance philology at Jena in 1871, receiving a full professorship there five years later. In 1883 he went to Tübingen, and in 1887 to Halle, whence he was called in 1892 to Leipzig. Among the numerous contributions of Sievers to Germanic philology, may be mentioned his editions of Tatian (2d ed. 1892), the Heliand (1878), and, in collaboration with Steinmeyer, Die althochdeutschen Glossen (4 vols., 1879-98), besides the Oxforder Benediktinerregel (1887). His original works on Germanics include Der Heliand und die angelsächsische Genesis (1875), Angelsächsische Grammatik (3d ed. 1898), and Zum angelsächsischen Vokalismus (1900). He also made important contributions to metrics in his Altgermanische Metrik (1892) and his Metrische Studien (1901-02), dealing with Hebrew metres, while his Grundzüge der Phonetik (5th ed. 1901) is one of the standard works on phonetics. In 1891 he became an editor of Paul and Branne's Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Litteratur, and contributed to Paul's Grundriss der germanischen Philologie (Strassburg, 1891 et seq.) the sections on runes, Gothic language and literature, and Germanic metre.