Christian Karl Reisig was a German philologist and linguist who was a native of Weissensee, Thuringia.

Reisig studied 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...

 under Gottfried Hermann

Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann

Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann was a German classical scholar and philologist.-Biography:He was born at Leipzig. Entering its university at the age of fourteen, Hermann at first studied law, which he soon abandoned for the classics...

 (1772-1848) at the University of Leipzig

University of Leipzig

The University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest universities in the world and the second-oldest university in Germany...

, and in 1812 furthered his studies at Göttingen. From 1813-15 he was a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars

Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...

, and afterwards became a lecturer at the University of Jena. In 1820 he relocated to the University of Halle as an associate professor, where in 1824 he became a full professor. Two of his better known students were Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl

Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl

Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl was a German scholar best known as a student of Plautus.-Biography:He was born in Großvargula, Thuringia. His family, in which culture and poverty were hereditary, were Protestants who had migrated several generations earlier from Bohemia...

 (1806-1876) and Friedrich Haase

Friedrich Gottlob Haase

Friedrich Gottlob Haase was a German classical scholar. He was born at Magdeburg.Haase studied at the Universities of Halle, Greifswald, and Berlin...

 (1808-1867), the latter having published an edition of Reisig's Vorlesungen über lateinische Sprachwissenschaft (Latin Lectures on Linguistics) in 1839. Reisig died on 17 January 1829 in Venice

Venice

Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

 at the age of 37.

Reisig was a classical philologist who is credited with developing a new branch of 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....

 known as "semasiology

Semasiology

Semasiology is a discipline within linguistics concerned with the question "what does the word X mean?". It studies the meaning of words regardless of their phonetic expression. Semasiology departs from a word or lexical expression and asks for its meaning, its different senses, i.e. polysemy...

". He introduced this new discipline because he felt that the study of word-meaning could not be adequately met within the constraints of etymology

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...

 or syntax

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

, and that semasiology would properly show the development of word-meanings in a logical and historical sense.