Ernst Sittig

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Ernst Carl Wilhelm Sittig (born February 1, 1887 in Berlin ; † December 25, 1955 in Tübingen ) was a German classical philologist and linguist .

Life

Ernst Sittig attended grammar school in Berlin and then studied philology at the universities of Jena , Berlin and Halle . In Tübingen he became a member of the Hohentübingen singers . In Halle he was in 1911 with a thesis De Graecorum nominibus Theophoris to Dr. phil. doctorate , whereby he turned to comparative linguistics during his studies . Sittig laid interpreters examination for Polish , Russian , Bulgarian and Modern Greek , and was from 1914 trainee teacher .

During the First World War , Ernst Sittig served in a decryption department of the army . From 1919 to 1924 he was employed as a civil servant in the higher cipher service of the Foreign Office . At the University of Berlin , Sittig completed his habilitation in 1923 as a private lecturer in Slavic Studies and Comparative Linguistics. He then served from 1924 to 1926 in Berlin as a teacher in higher education service operates. From 1926 he taught as a full professor at the University of Königsberg before he took over the chair for Slavic Studies and Comparative Linguistics at the University of Tübingen in 1929 , where he also held Slavic events until 1945. Sittig joined the NSDAP in 1933 . In the Second World War , as in the First, Sittig was deployed in a decryption department.

After 1950 Ernst Sittig devoted himself to the Minoan "script and language puzzle". Actually, a specialist of the Etruscan , where he was already in 1910 a connoisseur of ten ancient languages, had Sittig shortly before the First World War on Cyprus a bilingual Stone (1914 Bilingue ) in eteokyprischer and ancient Greek recognized language, part of the stone in the original, the other on a photo. Already at this point in time he assumed a relationship between the Cypriot script and the Cretan linear script. His investigations into linear scripts from Attica and Boeotia (the Mycenaean culture used the Cretan script for linear script B ) led Sittig in 1951 to the correct determination of eight phonetic values ​​from fifty Cretan syllables.

In 1955, shortly before his death, Sittig attempted to decipher the Phaistos disc . He considered the stamps on this to be a pictographic syllabary from around 1600 BC. In Greek . Sittig used a statistical method for deciphering the frequency of syllables according to their position in the word. The symbols of the disc would be used acrophonically , the "ship" means the syllable value NA(from the Greek Naus for "ship"), the "bull skin" TA(from Tauros , "bull") and the "head of a man with a plume" A(from Archos Aner 'prince'). To the left one could read, for example, ATANA MEKALA('great Athene '). According to this method, a total of 32 of 45 syllable characters are legible, but not necessarily understandable in terms of the words. Ernst Sittig was no longer able to complete the knowledge he had gained; he died on December 25, 1955 after suffering from a heart disease.

Fonts (selection)

  • De Graecorum nominibus Theophoris. Halle 1911 (dissertation).
  • Ancient Greek Theophoric Proper Names. 1912 (reprinted Chicago 1981).
  • Lithuanian dialects. 5 parts, Berlin 1928/29.
  • The Polish catechism of Ledezma and the Lithuanian catechisms of Daugssa and Anonymous from 1605 after d. Krakow originals a. Wolters Neudr. Interlinear. Goettingen 1929.
  • The older the arrangement of our cases and the origin of their designation as "cases". Stuttgart 1931.
  • Lithuanian. 2 parts, Berlin / Leipzig 1935.
  • Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum . Volumes 2, 1, 3: Tit. 5327-5606. Barth, Leipzig 1936.
  • Methodological to the decipherment of Crete syllabary Linear B . In: Minos: Revista de filología egea . No. 3 . Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1954, ISSN  0544-3733 , p. 10–19 ( online [PDF; 679 kB ; accessed on February 14, 2014]).
  • Did the Minoans speak Greek? In: Minos: Revista de filología egea . No. 3 . Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1954, ISSN  0544-3733 , p. 87–99 ( campus.usal.es [PDF; 894 kB ; accessed on February 14, 2014]).
  • To decipher the Minoan-Cypriot tablet by Enkomi . In: Minos: Revista de filología egea . No. 4 . Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1956, ISSN  0544-3733 , p. 33–42 ( campus.usal.es [accessed February 14, 2014]).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The liaison system in Tübingen. Documentation in the year of the university anniversary in 1977. Tübingen 1978, p. 90.
  2. ↑ a b Ernst Sittig in the Munzinger Archive , accessed on April 12, 2012 ( beginning of the article freely accessible)
  3. ^ History of the Slavic Seminary. Twentieth century (until 1961). uni-tuebingen.de, accessed on April 12, 2012 .
  4. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 585.
  5. ↑ Hans Pars : But Crete was divine. The experience of the excavations (=  The modern non-fiction book . Volume 35 ). 3. Edition. Walter-Verlag, Olten and Freiburg im Breisgau 1965, p. 337-341 .
  6. ↑ Hans Pars: But Crete was divine. The experience of the excavations (=  The modern non-fiction book . Volume 35 ). 3. Edition. Walter-Verlag, Olten and Freiburg im Breisgau 1965, p. 366/367 .

Web links
personal data
SURNAME Moral, Ernst
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sittig, Ernst Carl Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German linguist
DATE OF BIRTH February 1, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH December 25, 1955
Place of death Tübingen