August Friedrich Pott

August Friedrich Pott (14 November 1802 in Nettelrede, Hanover – 5 July 1887 in Halle) was a German pioneer in linguistics.

He became a schoolmaster in Celle,[1] but completed his doctoral dissertation, De relationibus quae praepositionibus in Linguis denotantur, in 1827 at Göttingen University.

As he was not satisfied giving classes in Celle, he went to the University of Berlin to study with Franz Bopp, an important pioneer in Indo-European linguistics.

[2] His works, notably Etymologische Forschungen (1834–1836),[1] established the modern etymological studies on the basis of the correspondence of sounds occurring in related words in the Indo-European languages.

[5] He vehemently criticized politization or mystical interpretation of linguistics (e.g. in Anti-Kaulen: Oder mystische Vorstellungen vom Ursprung der Völker und Sprachen 1863) and therefore, rejected Arthur de Gobineau's book Versuch über die Ungleichheit der Menschenrassen ('Essay on the inequality of the races') as lacking a scientific base.