Karl Heinrich Menges

Karl Heinrich Menges (born April 22, 1908 in Frankfurt am Main ; † September 20, 1999 in Vienna ) was a German Turkologist , Tungusologist , Altaist , Slavist , dravidologist and nostratist .

Life

Menges was born in Frankfurt and graduated from the Lessing-Gymnasium there in 1926 . His talent for languages ​​caught the attention of Karl August Wittfogel , who described him as a “wonder student”. In addition to Latin and Greek , he had taken Italian , English and Hebrew as electives and studied Russian on his own .

Menges initially studied ethnology , geography , meteorology and sinology for two semesters at the University of Frankfurt . In addition, he attended courses in Russian and Bulgarian and learned Ottoman . He then studied Slavic Studies, Sanskrit , Ottoman and Ethnology in Munich for two semesters . In the spring of 1928 he went to Berlin , where he continued to study Slavic Studies, Turkology and General Linguistics . He took part in the Turkology Congress in Baku and an expedition to Samarkand in June 1929 and maintained contacts with Soviet scientists.

From 1930 to 1932 Menges studied further in Berlin and received his doctorate in February 1932. In 1931 he traveled with his uncle through Dalmatia, Herzegovina and Bosnia .

In 1933 Menges took up a position as a scientific assistant at the Oriental Commission of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin under the Turkologist Willi Bang-Kaup . In the same year he traveled again to the Soviet Union, where he a. a. Yevgeny D. Polivanov , Lev. W. Stscherba , Sergej Je. Malow and Leonid P. Potapov met. He then succeeded his late teacher Willi Bang as Professor of Turkic Studies. At the institute he was mainly responsible for the modern Turkic languages ​​and Annemarie von Gabain for the Old Turkish .

After Menges arrested and released again because of his contacts in the Soviet Union, but was still spied on and repeatedly interrogated and had to testify in a trial against a group of Berlin Communists, he left Germany in December 1936. He initially lived in Prague for a year , afterwards a few months in Budapest and finally accepted an invitation to Turkey in September 1937 .

In Ankara , Menges taught Russian at the Tarih, Dil ve Coğrafya Faküllei . He was also spied on by the NSDAP in Turkey .

In the spring of 1940 Menges accepted a call to Columbia University . He traveled overland via Moscow and Vladivostok , then on via Tokyo and Honolulu and landed in San Francisco in August 1940 . He arrived in New York in September and began teaching in the Department of East European Languages at Columbia University. Soon he was teaching not only Old Church Slavonic , Russian and Russian literature , but also Old Uighur . In 1947 Menges became Associate Professor of Slavic and Altaic Languages . He worked u. a. participated in the Chinese History Project and also taught Manchurian . In 1956 he became Professor of Altaic Philology .

Since the 1960s Menges dealt with the assumption of the nostratic, i.e. H. a genetic relationship of the Indo-European , Altaic, Ural , Dravidian , Semito-Hamitic or Afro-Asian and Kartvelian language families.

In 1976 Menges retired .

After a research stay in Leningrad , he went to the University of Vienna as a visiting professor for Turkish Studies with his extensive library , where he taught and researched until shortly before his death.

He was a member of the Société asiatique based in Paris, the Royal Central Asian Society in London, the Société Finno-Ougrienne in Helsinki, the Société d'Iranologie in Teheran, the Societas Uralo-Altaica in Göttingen and Hamburg and International Association of Tamil Research in Kuala Lumpur and Madras.

Publications (selection)

• Glossary for the folkloric texts from East Turkistan II (= treatises of the Academy of Sciences and Literature. Humanities and social science class. Born 1954, Volume 14).
• Čaỿataji in the Persian representation of Mīrzā Mahdī Xān (= treatises of the humanities and social sciences class of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. Born 1956, No. 9).

literature

• Helga Anetshofer: Karl Heinrich Menges. Slavist, Turkologist, Altaist, Nostratician (1908–1999) . In: CAJ  45.1 (2001), pp. 3-6.
• Gerhard Doerfer: Obituary for Karl Heinrich Menges. In: TDiA  9 (1999), pp. 209-210.
• Steven E. Hegaard: Karl Heinrich Menges Bibliography . Arcadia Bibliographica Virorum Eruditorum fasc. 1; Wiesbaden: 1979.
• Michael Knüppel: List of publications by Karl Heinrich Menges together with an index of lexemes and morphemes covered in the works . New supplements to the Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 1; Vienna: Lit, 2006.
• Roy Andrew Miller: For Karl Heinrich Menges April 22, 1908 - April 22, 1983 . In: Central Asiatic Journal  27 (1983), pp. 161-167.
• Roy Andrew Miller: In Memoriam Karl Heinrich Menges . In: UAJ  NF 16 (1999/2000), pp. 1-10.
• Сайфи Низамович Муратов: Карл Генрих Менгес к 70-летию со дня рождения . In: Советская тюркология  2 (1978), pp. 92-94.
• Valery Stojanov: On the 90th birthday of Prof. Dr. Karl Heinrich Menges . In: Balkansko ezykoznanie / Linguistique Balkanique  1 (1999-2000), Sofia 2000, pp. 27-38.
• Andreas Tietze: Karl Heinrich Menges . In: Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes  91 (2001), pp. 7–8.