Georg Valentin von Munthe af Morgenstierne

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Georg Morgenstierne

Georg Valentin von Munthe af Morgenstierne (born January 2, 1892 in Oslo , † March 3, 1978 in Oslo) was a Norwegian Indo-Iranist . He published under the name Georg Morgenstierne.

Life

Morgenstierne received his doctorate in November 1918 with a treatise on the relationship between Cārudatta and Mṛcchakaṭikā at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin . Morgenstierne's teachers included Heinrich Lüders , Sten Konow and Wilhelm Schulze .

In 1930 he was appointed professor at the University of Gothenburg . From 1937 until his retirement in 1962, Morgenstierne was Professor of Indian Language and Literature at the University of Oslo .

From the 1920s he made research trips to India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran and published Indological and Iranian studies. Morgenstierne undertook his first field research trip to Afghanistan in 1924; it was supported by the Norwegian Institute for Collective Kulturforskning, founded in 1922 . He researched the diversity of the country's languages, about the structure of which little was known until then. In 1929 he traveled to northwest India, now Pakistan. After the Second World War , several smaller trips to Afghanistan followed, especially Nuristan.

To Morgenstiernes merits include the exploration of dardischen and kafirischen languages that had no written tradition tradition. Morgenstierne collected phonetically reliable records of these language groups and thus created the basis for all further research. He was an advocate of historical phonology and the scientific comparison of languages. He showed that the Dardic languages ​​are of purely Indo-Aryan origin, but the Nuristani languages ​​(then Kafiri languages) cannot be derived from Indian, but represent a separate branch of Indo-Iranian. He thus became a supporter of the hypothesis of the third language branch of the Indo-Iranian language family, which was previously represented by G. A. Grierson (1906). In the form of Morgenstierne, this thesis is generally recognized today, even if some Indo-Europeanists initially met it with skepticism. His assignment of the Dardic languages ​​to Indo-Aryan is also widely accepted today.

Morgenstierne's main work is a monumental collection that appeared from 1929 to 1973 under the title Indo-Iranian Frontier Languages . Morgenstierne published on almost every Iranian language. On his 70th birthday, friends and colleagues dedicated the Indo-Iranica commemorative publication to him .

In 1964 he was elected a corresponding member of the British Academy .

Works

  • Indo-Iranian frontier languages. Oslo, Vol. 1, 1929, Vol. 2, 1938, Vol. 3/1, 1967, Vol. 3/2, 1944, Vol. 3/3, 1956, 2nd edition Oslo 1973 with Vol. 4
  • Etymological Vocabulary of Pashto . Oslo 1927. Revised by Josef Elfenbein as: A new etymological vocabulary of Pashto , Wiesbaden 2003
  • Etymological Vocabulary of the Shughni Group. Wiesbaden 1974

Honors

  • Indo-Iranica. Mélanges présentés à Georg Morgenstierne à l'occasion de son 70th anniversaire. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1964 (Festschrift)

literature

Web links

Commons : Georg Morgenstierne  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ George Buddruss: Georg Morgienstierne 1892-1978. In: Afghanistan-Journal , Volume 5, 1978, p. 110
  2. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed July 8, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Munthe af Morgenstierne, Georg Valentin von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Morgenstierne, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian linguist
DATE OF BIRTH January 2, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Oslo
DATE OF DEATH March 3, 1978
Place of death Oslo