Rasmus Rask

Rasmus Christian Rask was born on November 22, 1787, in Brændekilde on the island of Funen. Possessing an astonishing linguistic genius, he mastered dozens of languages and published the first systematic grammar of Old Norse (Icelandic) in 1811.

In his 1818 prize essay Undersøgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse, Rask demonstrated through regular phonetic shifts that Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Greek, and Latin shared a common ancestor—formulating the sound shift laws later popularized by Jacob Grimm. Between 1816 and 1823, he undertook an arduous linguistic journey across Russia, Persia, and India to study Avestan and Sanskrit, returning with priceless manuscripts before dying of tuberculosis at forty-four.