Otto Bremer

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Otto Bremer (born November 22, 1862 in Stralsund ; † August 8, 1936 in Halle (Saale) ) was a German philologist and phonetician .

Life

Bremer was the son of a bookseller. After graduating from high school in Stralsund, he studied German philology and comparative linguistics from 1881 to 1886 at the University of Leipzig , Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin (among others with Karl Müllenhoff , Wilhelm Scherer ) and Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg ( Karl Bartsch ). In 1885 he received his doctorate in Leipzig under Eduard Sievers with a thesis on the development of the Indo-European ē in the oldest Germanic languages to become Dr. phil. His habilitation followed in 1888 - also with Sievers - at the United University of Halle-Wittenberg with a thesis on Amringian - Foehringian language teaching. He had a pronounced rivalry with his Germanist colleague Konrad Burdach in Halle . Study trips to research the North Frisian languages took people from Bremen between 1886 and 1898 to Amrum , Föhr , North Frisia , Helgoland , Wangerooge and "Neu-Wangerooge" near Varel . From 1888 to 1904 he held the position of private lecturer, in 1898 he was appointed titular professor for German philology at the University of Halle.

From 1904 to 1921 he was a non-civil servant, associate professor for phonetics and general linguistics, in 1919 the subject German dialect research was added. In 1905 he led a phonetic course in Transylvania Sibiu . In 1906 he married Karoline Lange (née Brömmel). He had a daughter with her and two stepchildren from his wife's first marriage. Otto Bremer founded the Phonetic Collection in 1910 , which from 1922 had the status of an independent institution of the University of Halle-Wittenberg. He also worked as a language tutor , from 1910 to 1925 he was chairman of the Halle branch in the General German Language Association (ADSV). In several writings he spoke out sharply against the use of English and French foreign words in the German language.

Bremer had a conservative-patriotic attitude. During the First World War he wrote a memorandum for a new language policy in Lithuania ( Upper East ) on behalf of General Erich Ludendorff . He was a member of the German Fatherland Party , the Association for Germanness Abroad (VDA) and, from its foundation in 1918, a member of the German National People's Party (DNVP). After the end of the war he was active in the resident militia . Before the referendum in Schleswig in 1920, Bremer campaigned for the German side and was expelled from the Allied Commission. From 1921 he was a civil servant, associate professor. In 1928 he was appointed full professor and at the same time retired. As an emeritus he continued to teach and supervised his phonetic collection. Because of his Jewish origins, he stopped teaching in 1934. In the following year his license to teach and his title were revoked.

He died of cancer.

plant

As a phonetician, Bremer was particularly interested in the North German dialects, but above all in the Frisian dialect, Wangerooger Frisian , which was spoken in Wangerooge until 1930 and in Varel ("Neu-Wangerooge") until 1950 . He himself traveled the island to take interviews with speakers. In the years 1893 to 1926 he published the "Collection of short grammars of German dialects". For the 14th and 15th editions of Brockhaus' Konversations-Lexikon (1894 and 1929) he created a representation of the German dialects and designed a dialect map. With his dialectological work, Bremer was in competition with Georg Wenker and his project of a German language atlas , about which he expressed himself critically.

Bremer was one of the first phoneticists to work with sound recordings on phonograph cylinders , which were later transferred to shellac records and finally digitized. After Bremer's death, his phonetic collection was transferred to Richard Wittsack for further scientific supervision. In 1947 the collection was merged with the Institute for Speech Studies founded by Wittsack , which later became the Institute for Speech Science and Phonetics of the University of Halle .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e News about Otto Bremer . In: Voicemail . 57 (I / 2013), March 2013, ISSN  1868-8748 , p. 10 ( vds-ev.de [PDF]).
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Hans-Joachim Solms: Bremer, Otto. In: Christoph König (Ed.): Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950. Volume 1. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, pp. 268–269.
  3. ^ A b Otto Basler:  Bremer, Otto. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 581 f. ( Digitized version ).
  4. ↑ a b c Entry on Otto Bremer in the Catalogus Professorum Halensis
  5. ^ History of the institute , Department of Speech Science and Phonetics, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.
personal data
SURNAME Bremer, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philologist and phoneticist
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH Stralsund
DATE OF DEATH August 8, 1936
Place of death Halle (Saale)