Justus Georg Schottelius

Surmounting the many upheavals of the Thirty Years' War (1618–48) and the untimely death of his father, Schottelius managed to acquire a good education, notably at the Akademisches Gymnasium in Hamburg and at the universities of Groningen, Leiden, Leipzig and Wittenberg.

[2] he sought to raise the lowly status of German, to celebrate its high antiquity, to defend it against latter-day foreign influences, to re-examine it in the light of current linguistic theory, to promote its refinement and use as a communicative medium, and ultimately to inaugurate a new, prestigious epoch in the language.

Combining many discourse traditions, it embraces language history, orthography, accidence, word-formation, idioms, proverbs, syntax, versification, onomastics and other features, including a dictionary of more than 10,000 German root-words .

One key argument here was the German language's rich lexical productivity, its ability to combine root-words (Wurtzeln, Stammwörter, mostly monosyllabic) and affixes (Hauptendungen) in ways which gave it unique and infinite powers of expression.

[7][8] Seeking to demonstrate that the German language had a rational basis, Schottelius based his grammar partly on the Classical principle of analogy, identifying (and sometimes even artificially creating) patterns of regularity or similarity in spelling and grammatical inflection.

Influential here was Schottelius's own conception of High German as a language transcending the many dialects, and as currently used in writing by 'learned, wise and experienced men' (viri docti, sapientes et periti).

[9] Schottelius argued distinctively that this idealized, supra-regional form of German could not be acquired spontaneously, and certainly not from speech: it had to be 'learnt through much diligence and toil' (durch viel Fleis und Arbeit ...

Schottelius's wider legacy has been variously assessed, but it lies mainly in the development of linguistic ideas, with measurable influences to be found in early grammars of Danish, Dutch, Swedish and Russian, and in theoretical writings on these and other languages.