August Friedrich Pott was a German pioneer in linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

.

Pott was a theology student at the University of Göttingen, where he became interested in philology

Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

. He completed his doctoral dissertation in 1827 and went to the University of Berlin to study with Franz Bopp

Franz Bopp

Franz Bopp was a German linguist known for extensive comparative work on Indo-European languages.-Biography:...

, an important pioneer in Indo-European linguistics. He became an unsalaried lecturer in general linguistics there in 1830 and became the professor of general linguistics at the University of Halle in 1833, where he remained for the rest of his life. His works established the modern etymological studies on the basis of the correspondence of sounds occurring in related words in the Indo-European languages. He is also considered the nineteenth century's most important philologist of Romany

Romani language

Romani or Romany, Gypsy or Gipsy is any of several languages of the Romani people. They are Indic, sometimes classified in the "Central" or "Northwestern" zone, and sometimes treated as a branch of their own....

, the language of the Gypsies.