Eduard_Prokosch

Eduard Prokosch (15 May 1876 – 11 August 1938) was an Austrian-born American historical linguist who specialized in Indo-European and, specifically, Proto-Germanic studies.
Prokosch was born in Eger, Bohemia (modern Cheb, Czech Republic), and studied law in Vienna, passing the bar examination before immigrating to the United States in 1898.
Prokosch taught German and Germanic philology at many American educational institutions, including the University of Chicago, the University of Texas, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he taught Leonard Bloomfield, Bryn Mawr College and New York University.
Prokosch finished his career as the Sterling Professor of Germanic Languages at Yale University, during which time he wrote his most influential work, A Comparative Germanic Grammar, which broke ground in the fields of Indo-European and Germanic studies.
Prokosch was a signer of the call that led to the formation of the Linguistic Society of America and served as its president in 1930. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America in 1937.
He was the father of the dance ethnologist Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, the writer Frederic Prokosch and the architect Walther Prokosch and father-in-law and former teacher of the linguist Hans Kurath. He died in an automobile accident in New Haven, Connecticut shortly before the book was published in 1939.