Alfred Schmitt (linguist)

Alfred Schmitt (born April 1, 1888 in Rixdorf , Teltow district , † January 1, 1976 in Munich ) was a German linguist , phonetician and script researcher.

Life

Alfred Schmitt, son of a clergyman from the Moravian Brothers Church and grew up in their environment, attended the private grammar school of the Brethren in Niesky in Upper Lusatia and passed his matriculation examination (1907) at the grammar school in Liegnitz . Shaped by his ecclesiastical environment, he then studied theology at the theological seminar of the Brethren Church in Gnadenfeld in Upper Silesia, completed this course in the summer of 1910 and then took up the position of "academic assistant teacher" at his former Niesky high school.

Instead of going into church service, as he expected, he began a new course of study in 1919 after military service and French imprisonment and studied, while earning his living as a tutor on a manor, also classical philology (with Johannes Geffcken and Rudolf Helm ), Romance studies (with Rudolf Zenker ) and German studies (with Hermann Teuchert ) at the University of Rostock. Very soon, however, his interests shifted to comparative linguistics (represented there by Gustav Herbig until 1921 and then by Hermann Güntert ) , and in 1922 he received his doctorate there under Güntert . After some time as a manor manager, he worked from 1927, also at the University of Rostock, as a lecturer for Latin and Greek. At the same time, however , he completed his habilitation three years later with Leo Weisgerber , the successor of Hermann Güntert, in the subject of comparative linguistics.

In 1935 Schmitt was appointed as a scheduled associate professor for comparative linguistics in Erlangen and in the winter of 1941 as a full professor for comparative linguistics at the University of Münster, but was drafted into military service and, after being released from it, to the Volkssturm and, at the age of fifty-seven, was still in America Advised as a prisoner of war, to begin his work there in the summer semester of 1946 He worked in Münster until his retirement in the spring of 1956. The time after his retirement he spent in Munich.

Schmitt's students include Alfred Heubeck , Peter Hartmann , Heinz Wissemann and Roland Harweg .

Create

Schmitt's main focus is on the fields of phonetics , the history of writing and general linguistics . His first two books, the dissertation and the habilitation thesis , are dedicated to phonetics and in particular to accent theory . The core idea of ​​his theory of accents is the distinction between a strong and a weakly centralizing accent , a distinction which he has also made subservient to a correction of the traditional conception of the so-called musical accent in languages ​​such as Latin and Greek.

The real milestones in Schmitt's oeuvre, however, are his two monumental works on two modern script inventions at the beginning of the 20th century, the one (written with the collaboration of John Hinz) on a script invention by the Eskimos in Alaska and that - by Claus Haebler as the foundation of one Bamum - philology praised - about the invention of the Bamum script in Cameroon . Schmitt has drawn the sum of his research into the history of scriptures in his late work, Origin and Development of Fonts , which was only published posthumously .

Of Schmitt's contributions to general linguistics, his book on language acquisition by the deaf-dumb-blind American writer Helen Keller should be mentioned.

Book publications

• Research on general theory of accents with an application to the accent of Greek and Latin . Heidelberg 1924. (Dissertation)
• Accent and diphthongization . Heidelberg 1931. (Habilitation thesis)
• together with Hermann Teuchert: German dialects. Mecklenburgisch II and Pomeranian . Edited by HT and AS Berlin 1933.
• Sample of a dictionary of linguistic terminology submitted to linguists for assessment by AS With a foreword by Leo Weisgerber. Berlin, Leipzig 1933.
• The invention of writing . Speech given in front of the University of Erlangen on June 19, 1938. Erlangen 1938.
• Studies on the history of writing. A font development in Alaska around 1900 . With the assistance of Rev. John Hinz. Volume I: Text . Volume II: Figures and an insert: Tables on the Alaskan writing development . Leipzig 1940. [Most of the copies of this first edition of the book were burned in 1942 in a bomb attack in the publishing house of the Harrassowitz publishing house in Leipzig . A revised reprint of this edition was published by Claus Haebler in 1981 by the same publisher in Wiesbaden. ISBN 3-447-02162-4 ]
• The Alaska script and its historical significance . Marburg 1951.
• The letter H in Greek . Münster / Westf. 1952.
• Musical accent and ancient metric. Two lectures . Münster / Westf. 1953, 2nd edition Münster / Westf. 1975. ISBN 3-402-05389-6
• Helen Keller and the language . Münster, Cologne 1954.
• The Bamum script . Volume I: Text . Volume II: Tables . Volume III: Certificates . Wiesbaden 1963.
• Creation and development of fonts . Arranged for printing after the author's death and published by Claus Haebler with an appreciation and a list of the author's publications. Cologne, Vienna 1980. ISBN 3-412-06476-9
• On phonetics, written history and general linguistics. Small fonts . Edited by Claus Haebler. Wiesbaden 1984. ISBN 3-447-02317-1

literature

• P [eter] H [artmann]: Prof. Dr. Alfred Schmitt 70 years . In: Westfälische Nachrichten . Münster / Westf. Born in 1958, A, No. 78 from April 2, 1958.
• [anonymous] Prof. Alfred Schmitt 75 years . In: Westfälische Nachrichten . Münster / Westf. Born in 1963, A, No. 77 from April 1, 1963.
• Claus Haebler : Alfred Schmitt (1888–1976) and list of publications . In: Alfred Schmitt: Origin and Development of Fonts . Arranged for printing after the author's death and published by Claus Haebler with an appreciation and a list of the author's publications. Cologne, Vienna 1980. ISBN 3-412-06476-9 , pp. XIII-XLIII.
• Claus Haebler: Foreword . In: Alfred Schmitt: On phonetics, history of writing and general linguistics . Small fonts . Edited by Claus Haebler, Wiesbaden 1984. ISBN 3-447-02317-1 , pp. XIII-XVI.

Individual proof

1. ^ Claus Haebler: Alfred Schmitt (1888–1976) . In: Alfred Schmitt: Origin and Development of Fonts . Arranged for printing after the author's death and published by Claus Haebler with an appreciation and a list of the author's publications. Cologne, Vienna 1980. ISBN 3-412-06476-9 , pp. XXXII.