Diez, Friedrich Christian (frē`drĭkh krĭs`tyän dēts), 1794–1876, German philologist. A professor at Bonn, Diez is noted as one of the founders of the science of Romanic philology. His great works were a grammar of the Romanic languages (1836; later much enlarged) and a dictionary of the Romanic languages (1853; also much enlarged in later editions).

Diez, Friedrich Christian

(born March 15, 1794, Giessen, Hesse-Darmstadt—died May 29, 1876, Bonn, Ger.) German linguist, regarded as the founder of Romance philology. He began his career as a scholar of medieval Provençal poetry and taught literature at the University of Bonn from 1823 to the end of his life. Diez applied the methodology of comparative linguistics pioneered by Jacob Grimm and Franz Bopp to the Romance languages. In his Grammar of the Romance Languages (1836–44) and Etymological Dictionary of the Romance Languages (1853), he demonstrated the relationship of “Vulgar” or Spoken Latin to Classical Latin and the evolution of Romance languages from Spoken Latin into their modern forms.