Jost Trier

Jost Trier was born in Schlitz, Hesse, on 15 December 1894, the son of physician Jost Christian Ludwig Trier (1859 – 1939) and Else (1870 – 1938). After completing volksschule, he graduated from the gymnasium in Barmen, where the family had moved. but on the outbreak of World War I, volunteered for the Army. He earned a teaching qualification in 1920 and following that taught secondary school while completing his degree. ==Career==

After completing his PhD, Trier taught at the University of Marburg, initially as an academic assistant and following his habilitation in 1928, as a privatdozent. (A second, memorial festschrift was published in 1975.) Trier specialized in Germanic linguistics, particularly in German and later in his career in etymology. He was one of a generation of German studies scholars in the 1920s and 1930s who turned away from philology and older languages to emphasise structures of meaning in the modern language. but was not engaged with Nazi ideology ==Personal life and death==

In 1923 he married Margarete Fressel (). They had two sons and a daughter; his stepson was missing in action in the Second World War. He died on 15 September 1970 in Bad Salzuflen and is buried in Schlitz. ==Honours==

Trier was elected to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities comparatively early in his career, in 1939, and to the Goethe-Gesellschaft in Weimar in 1955. ==Books==

• Der Heilige Jodocus, 1924 • Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes. Die Geschichte eines sprachlichen Feldes, 1931, repr. 1973 • Lehm: Etymologien zum Fachwerk, 1951 • Holz: Etymologien aus dem Niederwald, 1952 • Venus: Etymologien um das Futterlaub, 1963 • Aufsätze und Vorträge zur Wortfeldtheorie, ed. Anthony van der Lee and Oskar Reichmann, 1973 (posthumous), repr. 2019 • Wege der Etymologie, ed. Hans Schwarz, 1981 (posthumous) ==References==