Otto Schrader

Otto Schrader (28 March 1855 in Weimar - died 21 March 1919 in Breslau) was a German philologist best known for his work on the history of German and Proto-Indo-European vocabulary dealing with various aspects of material culture, such as the names of domesticated plants and animals, the names of the metals, etc.

Quotes

• [a]s regards all that refers to fields and gardens, the growing of flowers is the most recent conquest of European humanity. The pragmatism of prehistoric people had prevented them from discovering the attraction of these objects, so cherished by ladies and poets, in the same way that their ears remained deaf to the song of the lark and the nightingale. This only changed when flower scented perfumes from the East reached Europe and when man’s relationship with nature, at least in the upper echelons of society, began to become sentimental. (I, p. 151)
  • quoted in Jean-Paul Demoule - The Indo-Europeans_ Archaeology, Language, Race, and the Search for the Origins of the West