Emil victory

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Emil Sieg (born August 12, 1866 in the Breitenteicher mill near Frauenhagen , Uckermark , † January 23, 1951 in Göttingen ) was a German Indologist and Tocharologist .

Life

Emil Sieg, son of a mill owner and farmer from Uckermark, attended grammar school in Prenzlau, and then from 1885 to study classical philology and Sanskrit in Berlin, Tübingen and Munich . In Munich he was first able to get enthusiastic about Sanskrit through Ernst Kuhn . Returned to Berlin in 1888, he received his doctorate in 1891 with his dissertation on a work on the phonology of Vedic texts . A year later a sequel appeared.

After completing his doctorate, Sieg moved into the university again for a semester. In Göttingen , “ in that one semester, as Sieg admits in his self-written résumé, [...] the decisive basis for his later occupation with the Sanskrit grammarians was laid. "

In August 1896 , Sieg completed his habilitation with the text: An alphabetically ordered "Specimen" of a compilation and evaluation of the information from late Vedic exegetical and other literature for the myths of the Rgveda . Part of this work was fully elaborated in the treatise on the legends of the Rig Veda and the Indian narrative tradition published in 1902. Sieg received recognition for this work, among other things, in Ernst Windisch's story about Sanskrit philology:

"Sieg's strength does not consist in fantastic assumptions, but in the methodical use of what has been handed down, [...] Sieg's writing [...] proves the value of the old tradition, but also reveals its changeability, the death of old materials and the emergence of new ones."

- Ernst Windisch

For 12 years he was a private lecturer in Indian philology in Berlin . In 1909 he followed the call of the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel to the chair and gave lectures on Indo-European languages ​​and Sanskrit. In 1918/19 he was rector of the CAU.

Appointed to the chair in Göttingen in 1920 , he stayed there until his death. In 1921 he was elected a full member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . In November 1933 he was one of the signatories of the professors' commitment at German universities and colleges to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist state .

Turfan expeditions

The network of the silk road

At the end of the 19th century , the reports from European travelers and scholars about the discoveries and finds along the Silk Road aroused the interest of Albert Grünwedel , director of the Indian department of the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin. Through the four Turfan expeditions initiated by Grünwedel , thousands of remains of paintings and other art objects as well as around 40,000 text fragments reach Berlin.

At the suggestion of Professor Richard Pischel , full professor of comparative linguistics and Indology at the University of Halle , Sieg and his former student Wilhelm Siegling (1880–1946) were asked to sift through the manuscript material, whereupon they edited the surviving parts of a Sanskrit grammar discovered there and began to study these manuscripts. The first result of this work was a fragment of a Sanskrit grammar from Sängim-Agiz, Chinese Turkestan . A second publication entitled New Fragments of Sanskrit Grammar from Chinese Turkestan appeared a year later.

Tocharian language

While Sieg and Siegling were working with the scripts, they discovered that a large number of manuscripts were written in an unfamiliar language, and therefore initially referred to them as "Unarian".

Tocharian manuscript ( Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation )

With the help of a few bilingual manuscripts, Sieg and Siegling were able to decipher the documents and in 1908 submitted an essay in Berlin under the title " Tocharisch, the language of the Indoskythians, preliminary remarks on a previously unknown literary language ". They succeeded in proving that the language must be ascribed to the Indo-European language family and that this comes from the European rather than the Indo-Iranian region. They were also able to prove that the language had two dialects, which they called Tocharian A and B.

In the first half of the 20th century, Sieg and Siegling worked together on texts of the dialect A of the Tocharian language. They decided to edit all of the manuscripts in Tocharian A first. However, their work was interrupted in 1915 when Siegling was drafted into the army. Thereupon Sieg published the first edition under the titles “ The story of the lion makers in Tocharian version ” and “ The fairy tale of the mechanic and the painter in Tocharian version ”.

After Siegling's return from the front, they devoted themselves again to Tocharian B and began working on the Udana , a Buddhist script made up of short texts from the Palikanon . When Siegling died in 1946, Sieg published the result of their joint work in 1949 under the title Tocharian language remnants, language B , which contained texts, translations and a glossary.

Sieg is responsible for the groundbreaking work on remnants of Tocharian language, as well as a detailed Tocharian grammar, which he published in 1931 in collaboration with Siegling and Wilhelm Emil Heinrich Schulze . The deciphering of the Tocharian remained undisputed, but Sieg and Siegling increasingly got into controversy with colleagues regarding the language naming. In view of this, it was suggested, especially in the English-language literature, to replace the terms Tocharian A and B with Turfan and Kuchisch. However, since the assignment of the two variants to these two different regions is also speculative, this proposal has not yet prevailed.

Fonts (selection)

  • Directory of the Bibliotheca Indica and related Indian series by works and numbers . Harrassowitz, Leipzig 1908.
  • Maitrisimit and "Tocharisch" . Meeting reports of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, 1916, pp. 395–417. (with FWK Müller)
  • Tocharian language remnants: Royal Prussian Turfan expeditions . Association of Scientific Publishers, Stuttgart 1921.
  • Remnants of Tocharian languages, Volume I. The texts. A. Transcription. De Gruyter, Berlin / Leipzig 1921. (with Wilhelm Siegling)
  • Tocharian grammar . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1931. (with Wilhelm Siegling and Wilhelm Schulze)
  • And yet "Tocharian" . Meeting reports of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Berlin 1937, pp. 130-139.
  • Obituary for Wilhelm Siegling , in: ZDMG, Vol. 99 (1945–49), pp. 147–149.
  • Tocharian language remnants. Language B, Book 1. The Udānālaṅkāra-Fragments. Text, translation and glossary. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1949.
  • Tocharian language remnants. Language B, booklet 2. Fragments No. 71-633 . Edited from the estate by Werner Thomas. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1953.
  • Small fonts . Steiner, Stuttgart 1991, [Reprint] / ed. by Klaus Ludwig Janert, ISBN 3-515-04021-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ W. Hartkopf (1983)
  2. ↑ a b H. Bechert (2001)
  3. ↑ a b E. Waldschmidt (1951)
  4. ↑ E. Windisch: History of Sanskrit Philology and Indian Classical Studies , Berlin 1992, p. 409
  5. ↑ F. Vollbehr, R. Weyl (1956)
  6. ^ International Dunhuang Project
  7. ↑ Rector's speeches (HKM)
  8. ↑ a b c V. Stache-Rosen (1981)
  9. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 226.
  10. ^ A b E. Sieg: Obituary for Wilhelm Siegling, in: ZDMG, Vol. 99 (1945-49), p. 147.
  11. ↑ O. Stolberg-Wernigerode (2007)
  12. ^ BW Fortson (2010)

literature

  • Heinz Bechert: Emil Sieg , in: Göttingen scholars. The Academy of Sciences in Göttingen in portraits and appreciations 1751-2001 , Göttingen 2001, p. 380.
  • Benjamin W. Fortson: Indo-European Language and Culture. An Introduction. 2nd edition, Blackwell Publishing, Malden MA et al. 2010, p. 351.
  • Werner Hartkopf: The Academy of Sciences of the GDR. A contribution to their history . Berlin 1983.
  • Otto zu Stolberg-Wernigerode: Wilhelm Emil Heinrich Schulze , in: New German biography. Vol. 23: Schinzel - Schwarz, ed. v. Hans Günter Hockerts for the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , Berlin 2007, p. 728f.
  • Valentina Stache-Rosen: German Indologists: Biographies of Scholars in Indian Studies with Writings in German , New Delhi 1981, pp. 169–171.
  • Friedrich Volbehr , Richard Weyl: Professors and lecturers at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, 1665-1954. With information about the other teaching staff and the university librarians and a list of the rectors , Kiel 1956.
  • Ernst Waldschmidt: Obituary for Emil Sieg . ZDMG 101 (1951), pp. 18-28.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Victory, Emil
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Indologist and Tocharologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 12, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH Breitenteicher Mühle, Frauenhagen , Uckermark
DATE OF DEATH January 23, 1951
Place of death Goettingen