Gustav Herdan

Gustav Herdan (born January 21, 1897 in Brno , † November 16, 1968 in Bournemouth ) was an Austro-English lawyer , statistician and linguist .

Life

Herdan began studying law in Vienna and Prague in the winter semester of 1917/18 . He received his doctorate in 1923 from the German University of Prague. He completed this doctorate without a dissertation , since no dissertations were being made in this subject at the time.

From 1933 onwards he studied Chinese in Berlin , London (diploma for classical Chinese), Prague and Vienna. In 1937 he completed his studies in Vienna with a doctorate in Sinology (East Asian languages) and English philology . He wrote a dissertation on the subject of reduplication with the title: The Reduplications of Chih Ching . There is only one copy that is kept in Vienna.

In 1938 he had to emigrate to England because of the political situation . There followed a degree in mathematics and statistics . From 1948 he was employed as a lecturer for statistics in medicine at the University of Bristol .

meaning

Herdan's importance for linguistics is that he was probably the first (1964) to present an overall presentation of quantitative linguistics .

An essential aspect of his work is the development and verification of mathematically formulated language laws (“statistical laws”). In connection with Ferdinand de Saussure's dichotomy of langue and parole as well as information theory and cybernetics , he and Pierre Guiraud and Charles Muller stand for the boom in quantitative linguistics in the 1950s and 1960s.

It deals on a statistical basis with many topics, for which it also provides extensive new data: Problems of the identification of anonymous authors, stylometry ( quantitative stylistics ), language change and language mixing, type-token relation , word length and word frequency distributions, connection between text length and Vocabulary range and between stylistics and language typology.

Several linguistic laws are presented in his works , including the Zipf ( Zipf's law ) or Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution, Poisson distribution, and log-normal distribution. This makes Herdan one of the pioneers in quantitative linguistics.

Works (selection)

• Language as Choice and Chance . Noordhoff, Groningen 1956.
• Type-Token Mathematics. A Textbook of Mathematical Linguistics . Mouton, 's-Gravenhage 1960.
• The Calculus of Linguistic Observations . Mouton, 's-Gravenhage 1962.
• Quantitative Linguistics . Butterworth, London 1964.
• The Structuralistic Approach to Chinese Grammar and Vocabulary . Two Essays .: Mouton, The Hague 1964.
• The advanced theory of language as choice and chance . Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg / New York 1966.

Note: Herdan, alone or with others, has published a large number of articles on mainly linguistic and medical topics.

literature

• Karl-Heinz Best : Herdan, Gustav . In: Harro Stammerjohann (Ed.): Lexicon Grammaticorum. A Bio-Bibliographical Companion to the History of Linguistics. Volume II: A - K. Niemeyer, Tübingen 2009, pp. 641f. ISBN 978-3-484-73068-7 .
• Karl-Heinz Best, Gabriel Altmann : Gustav Herdan (1897-1968) . In: Glottometrics 15, 2007, pages 92–96 (PDF full text ) (reprinted in: Karl-Heinz Best (Hrsg.): Studies on the history of quantitative linguistics. Volume 1. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2015, pages 68–73. ISBN 978-3-942303-30-9 .)
• Karl-Heinz Best, Gabriel Altmann: Word Length with G. Herdan. To the memory of G. Herdan who died October 16, 1968. In: Glottometrics 42, 2018, page 86–90 (PDF full text ) (Modeling of Herdan's data for German, English and Russian texts. The correct date of death is November 16 1968.)
• Luigi Heilmann: Gustav Herdan. In: Lingua e Stile 4, 1969, 93-96.
• Dieter Krallmann: Necrologium: Gustav Herdan 1898-1968 . In: Phonetica 20, 1969, 232-233.
• Jiří Krámský: Gustav Herdan - To Obituary . In: Philologia Pragensia 12, 1969, 175.
• Georg F. Meier: Obituary: Gustav Herdan . In: Journal for Phonetics, Linguistics and Communication Research 23, 1970, 110–111.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento from July 19, 2011 in the Internet Archive )