Helmut Meier

This article deals with the Germanist Helmut Meier. For other people see Helmut Meyer and Helmut Maier .

Helmut Meier (born December 20, 1897 in Broitzem , † July 30, 1973 in Braunschweig ) was a German teacher and German studies specialist .

Life

Helmut Meier attended the teacher training college in Braunschweig from 1912-1919 and took part in the First World War as a soldier in 1917/18 ; from 1919 he was an assistant teacher, from 1925 a teacher in Braunschweig, interrupted by military service from 1939 to 1945 and brief lectureship (didactics and mathematics) at the Kant College for Teacher Training in Braunschweig from 1946 to 1948. He retired in 1963; after that he continued to work as an employee in the school service at his own request.

Scientific work

In addition to his professional activity as a teacher and lecturer, Helmut Meier carried out studies on German language statistics for decades following Kaeding (1897) from 1922 (Aichele 2005: 18), the results of which he presented in his book (Meier 1964/67). For example, you can find statistics on the frequency of sentence and word lengths, the frequency with which letters and sounds are used in German, the frequency of grammatical phenomena (how often do nouns appear with or without certain accompanying words such as adjectives, articles or pronouns or how the different cases are often used?) or on the question of which subject areas are represented in a dictionary and how strongly. It is by far the most extensive and varied collection of data on German.

Meier compiled a lot of statistical data anew, others are based only on a new evaluation of Kaeding's material. In the second edition of his main work (Meier 1967), Meier published an alphabetical list of the words that Kaeding used with a frequency of at least 10, followed by a ranking list of the 7,994 words with a frequency of at least 51, as well as lists of 2240 most frequent conceptual words, sorted according to parts of speech, which reach at least 500 with Kaeding. These data therefore reflect the state of German at the end of the 19th century. (Meier worked out much more extensive ranking lists of words and terms, but only published their tips in the specified work.) In addition to language statistics, Meier published works on pedagogy and local history.

Award

In 1964, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Hamburg for his scientific life's work .

Fonts

• Language statistics in the service of the spelling reform. In: News sheet of the Volksbund for German spelling. 1935, pp. 34/35.
• Thirty years of counting research on the German vocabulary. In: mother tongue. 1951, pp. 6-14.
• Knowledge and commitment. For the future expansion of the frequency counts. In: mother tongue. 1952, pp. 250-252.
• The thousand most common word forms in the German language. Language statistics, task and obligation. In: mother tongue. 1952, pp. 88-94.
• German language statistics. 1964. 2nd, expanded and improved edition: Olms, Hildesheim 1967, 1978, ISBN 3-487-00735-5 .
• Thoughts on H. Meier's "German Language Statistics". In: mother tongue. 81, 1971, pp. 121-125.

literature

• Karl-Heinz Best : Helmut Meier (1897–1973). In: Glottometrics. 16, 2008, pp. 122–124 (PDF full text ).
• Dieter Aichele: Quantitative Linguistics in Germany and Austria. In: Reinhard Köhler, Gabriel Altmann, Rajmund G. Piotrowski (eds.): Quantitative Linguistics - Quantitative Linguistics. An international manual. de Gruyter, Berlin, New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015578-8 , pp. 16-23.
• Günther Gremminger: On counting research on the German vocabulary. In: mother tongue. 1951, pp. 173-174.
• Friedrich Wilhelm Kaeding (Hrsg.): Frequency dictionary of the German language. Established by a working committee of the German stenography systems. First part: word and syllable counts. Second part: letter counts. Self-published by the editor, Steglitz near Berlin 1897. Partial reprint in: Basic studies from cybernetics and humanities. Volume 4/1963.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Since 1974 a district of Braunschweig
2. ↑ More recent data on German language statistics can be found in many studies on quantitative linguistics , such as those of the Göttingen Quantitative Linguistics project