Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition

BUCK, CARL DARLING

(1866- ), American philologist, was born on the 2nd of October 1866, at Bucksport, Maine. He graduated at Yale in 1886, was a graduate student there for three years, and studied at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (1887-1889) and in Leipzig (1889-1892). In 1892 he became professor of Sanskrit and Indo-European comparative philology in the University of Chicago; but it is in the narrower field of the Italic dialects that his important work lies, including Der Vocalismus der oskischen Sprache (1892), The Oscan-Umbrian Verb-System (1895), and Grammar of Oscan and Umbrian (1904), as well as an excellent précis of the Italic languages in Johnson's Universal Cyclopaedia. He collaborated with W.G. Hale (q.v.) in the preparation of A Latin Grammar (1903). Of his contributions to reviews on phonological topics, perhaps the most important is his discussion of "Brugmann's Law."