Gabriel Altmann

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Gabriel Altmann (born May 24, 1931 in Poltár , Czechoslovak Republic ; † March 2, 2020 in Lüdenscheid ) was a linguist who worked for many years at the Ruhr University in Bochum . He spent his old age in Lüdenscheid.

Life

After finishing school, Gabriel Altmann studied Indonesian linguistics and Japanese philology at the Charles University in Prague . From 1960 to 1968 he worked at the Oriental Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava (Pressburg). In 1964 he completed his habilitation at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (Habilitation thesis: Kvantitativne štúdie z indonezistiky - "Quantitative Studies on Indonesian Studies"). In 1968 and 1969 he worked at the Institute for Phonetics at the University of Cologne, and in 1970 at the Institute for German Language (IDS) in Mannheim. In the same year 1970 he was a visiting professor at the Linguistics Institute of the Ruhr University in Bochum, where, after his renewed habilitation with the thesis Introduction to Quantitative Phonology (Exemplified on Indonesian) in 1971, he taught at the same institute until 1996.

Focus of work

The focus of Altmann's research, teaching and organizational activities was on quantitative linguistics . His main interest was the development of hypotheses on the laws of language that are derived from theoretical assumptions, formulated mathematically and then empirically verified. A whole series of language laws have found their currently valid form through him, such as the diversification law , the Menzerath-Altmann law named after him and the Piotrowski law , to name but a few. The aim of this work is the development of a language theory based on cooperating language laws; such a language theory becomes visible in the approach in linguistic synergetics .

In addition to his research work, Gabriel Altmann was an essential driver of the international organization of quantitative linguistics and the initiator of the book series Quantitative Linguistics (now over 60 volumes) as well as the journals Journal of Quantitative Linguistics (1994ff.) And Glottometrics (2001ff.) (PDF). The development of quantitative linguistics since the end of the 1970s was also shaped by him to a very large extent internationally.

Works (in chronological order)

The following list only contains monographs by Gabriel Altmann as sole or co-author:

  • together with Werner Lehfeldt: Allgemeine Sprachtypologie . Fink, Munich 1973. ISBN 3-7705-0938-2
  • Statistics for linguists. Brockmeyer, Bochum 1980. (2nd improved edition: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Trier 1995. ISBN 3-88476-176-5 )
  • together with Werner Lehfeldt: Introduction to quantitative phonology. Brockmeyer, Bochum 1980. ISBN 3-88339-150-6
  • Repetitions in texts. Brockmeyer, Bochum 1988. ISBN 3-88339-663-X
  • together with Rolf Hammerl: Discrete probability distributions I . Brockmeyer, Bochum 1989. ISBN 3-88339-764-4
  • together with Michael H. Schwibbe: The Menzerath Law in Information Processing Systems. Olms, Hildesheim 1989. ISBN 3-487-09144-5
  • together with Peter Zörnig: Discrete Probability Distributions II . Brockmeyer, Bochum 1992. ISBN 3-88339-981-7
  • together with Gejza Wimmer: Thesaurus of univariate discrete probability distributions. Stamm, Essen 1999. ISBN 3-87773-025-6
  • together with Arne Ziegler: Denotative text analysis. Edition Praesens, Vienna 2002. ISBN 3-7069-0131-5
  • together with Dariusch Bagheri, Hans Goebl, Reinhard Köhler, Claudia Prün: Introduction to Quantitative Lexicology . Peust & Gutschmidt, Göttingen 2002. ISBN 3-933043-09-3
  • together with Gejza Wimmer, Luděk Hřebíček, Slavomír Ondrejovič: Úvod do analýzy textov. Vydavateľstvo Slovenskej Akadémie vied, Bratislava 2003. ISBN 80-224-0756-9
  • together with Vivien Altmann: Erlkönig and mathematics. http://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/volltexte/2005/325/
  • together with Fengxiang Fan (Ed.): Analyzes of Script. Properties of Characters and Writing Systems. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2008. ISBN 978-3-11-019641-2 (Altmann is not only the editor but also the main author of this volume.)
  • together with Udo Strauss and Fengxiang Fan: Problems in Quantitative Linguistics I. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2008. ISBN 978-3-9802659-4-2 .
  • together with Vivien Altmann: Instructions for quantitative text analysis. Methods and Applications. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2008. ISBN 978-3-9802659-5-9 .
  • together with Reinhard Köhler: Problems in Quantitative Linguistics 2. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2008. ISBN 978-3-9802659-7-3 .
  • together with Ioan-Iovitz Popescu and Ján Mačutek: Aspects of Word Formation. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2009. ISBN 978-3-9802659-6-6 .
  • together with Ioan-Iovitz Popescu and others: Word Frequency Studies. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2009. ISBN 978-3-11-021852-7 .
  • together with Ioan-Iovitz Popescu and others: Vectors and Codes of Text. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2010. ISBN 978-3-942303-02-6 .
  • together with Arjuna Tuzzi and Ioan-Iovitz Popescu: Quantitative Analysis of Italian Texts. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2010. ISBN 978-3-942303-00-2 .
  • together with Ioan-Iovitz Popescu and Radek Čapek: The Lambda-structure of Texts. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2010. ISBN 978-3-942303-05-7 .
  • together with Radek Čech: Problems in Quantitative Linguistics 3. Dedicated to Reinhard Köhler on the occasion of his 60th birthday. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2011. ISBN 978-3-942303-08-8 .
  • together with Ioan-Iovitz Popescu, Karl-Heinz Best: Unified Modeling of Length in Language. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2014, ISBN 978-3-942303-26-2 .
  • Problems in Quantitative Linguistics 5. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2015. ISBN 978-3-942303-33-0 .
  • together with Peter Zörnig, Kamil Stachowski, Ioan-Iovitz Popescu, Tayebeh Mosavi Miangah, Ruina Chen: Positional Occurrences in Texts: Weighted Consensus Strings. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2018, ISBN 978-3-942303-37-8 .
  • Unified Modeling of Diversifications in Language. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2018, ISBN 978-3-942303-63-7 .
  • together with Emmerich Kelih: Problems in Quantitative Linguistics 6. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2018, ISBN 978-3-942303-57-6 .
  • together with Sergey Andreev, Michal Místecký: Sonnets: Quantitative Inquiries. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2018. ISBN 978-3-942303-71-2 .

There is also a lot of work as editor as well as essays and reviews.

Software and manual

  • Altmann Fitter. Iterative fitting of probability distributions. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 1997. ISBN 3-9802659-3-5 (tools for testing legal hypotheses)

Festschriften and the like

  • Rüdiger Grotjahn, Sebastian Kempgen, Reinhard Köhler, & Werner Lehfeldt (eds.): Viribvs Vnitis. Festschrift for Gabriel Altmann on his 60th birthday. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Trier 1991. ISBN 3-88476-007-6 (In addition to many humorous articles by friends, colleagues and students, it contains a short biography and a list of publications.) Second, digital, edition Bamberg 2019. ISBN 978-3-86821-797 -1 . Digital copy: https://fis.uni-bamberg.de/handle/uniba/45552
  • Peter Grzybek, & Reinhard Köhler (eds.): Exact Methods in the Study of Language and Text. Dedicated to Gabriel Altmann on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter 2007. ISBN 978-3-11-019354-1 . (Contains 67 articles in German and English; in the foreword a short biography and appreciation; in the appendix a list of the writings of Gabriel Altmann.)
  • Reinhard Köhler : Quantitative Syntax Analysis. Dedicated to Gabriel Altmann on the occasion of his 80th birthday. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin a. a. 2012. ISBN 978-3-11-027292-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary notice
  2. ↑ https://twitter.com/KCJ_OSU/status/1237796603613851649
personal data
SURNAME Altmann, Gabriel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Slovak-German linguist
DATE OF BIRTH May 24, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Poltár , Czechoslovak Republic
DATE OF DEATH March 2nd 2020
Place of death Ludenscheid