Otto Schrader (born 28 March 1855 in Weimar; died 21 March 1919 in Breslau) was a German philologist best known for his work on the history of German and Proto-Indo-European vocabulary dealing with various aspects of material culture, such as the names of domesticated plants and animals, the names of the metals, etc.
Schrader came from a civil servant family in Thuringia, attended Gymnasium in Weimar, and studied in Jena, Leipzig, and Berlin.
degree, in 1878 he received a teaching position at the Großherzogliches Gymnasium in Jena.
[1] Schrader supported Victor Hehn's thesis[2] that the Indo-Europeans were originally nomads.
Since there are no common Indo-European words for donkey or camel, Schrader assumed that the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans was in the steppes north of the Black Sea, on the Caspian Sea, and on the Aral Sea, an area referred to as the Pontic–Caspian steppe, where wild horses were a native species.