Renward Brandstetter

Renward Brandstetter (29 June 1860 – 17 April 1942) was a Swiss philologist and linguist who published about medieval and modern Swiss German and the older Swiss theatre history and studied the insular Malayo-Polynesian languages (now considered a subgroup of Austronesian languages).

Brandstetter reconstructed the sound system and a preliminary dictionary of what he called "Original Indonesian".

He observed that the predominantly disyllabic lexemes of the languages under consideration contain a recurrent -CVC element (or, less often, -CV) which carries a somewhat consistent meaning.

He indexed his manuscript lexicons of the principal languages of the region by their root, and then produced a list of hypothetical shared roots by comparing these lists across languages.

His papers are collected at the Haus zum Dolder, his library at the Zentral- und Hochschulbibliothek Luzern.