Otto Dempwolff

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Otto Dempwolff

Otto Heinrich Louis August Dempwolff (born May 25, 1871 in Pillau , † November 27, 1938 in Hamburg ) was a German linguist and ethnologist . Employed as a senior staff doctor in the imperial protection force , he studied the African languages ​​in Africa. Among other things, he was one of the first to work on the reconstruction of the Ur-Austronesian .

Life path

Dempwolff did his Abitur at the Luisen-Gymnasium in Memel . From 1888 to 1893 he studied at the universities in Königsberg, Marburg, Leipzig, Berlin and Tübingen. During this time he became a member of the Schaumburgia Marburg gymnastics club . On March 12, 1892, he received his doctorate from Berlin University. He passed his state examination on January 26th, 1893 in Tübingen, five days later he received his license to practice medicine in Stuttgart. During his military service from 1893 to 1894 he was a junior doctor in Munich, Memel and Tilsit. He then worked as a ship's doctor on two trips to South America . From 1895 he was a doctor in the service of the New Guinea Company (NGC). He reached Friedrich-Wilhelm-Hafen (FWH), today's Madang , on March 29, 1895. First he worked in the hospital on the offshore island of Siar , also with Auguste Hertzer , soon afterwards he became a health officer in the FWH and company doctor of the NGC. In 1897 he resigned from the service and returned to Europe. The following year he worked again as a ship's doctor.

During this time he spent the first two years in German South West Africa , and from 1900 to 1901 again in Berlin as a doctor at the Reich Colonial Office . In 1901 he was given a temporary leave of absence to research malaria there on behalf of Robert Koch , who himself had been in German New Guinea in 1899/1900 . During his stay in New Guinea from October 1901, he traveled to various islands. In February 1902 he fell ill with malaria himself in Stephansort . After his return trip, which took him via the USA from June to October 1903, he was then employed in Berlin at the Prussian Institute for Infectious Diseases .

After his return to Africa in late 1903, Dempwolff was deployed as a medical officer in the Herero War . From 1906 to 1911 he stayed in German East Africa , where he partly worked with Koch, but did not take part in his research on sleeping sickness .

Language research

Otto Dempwolff grave, Ohlsdorf cemetery

Dempwolff's real importance lies in the study of scientific research into African languages, which he had dealt with during the years of his stay there. He studied the language of the Khoikhoi in South West Africa (then called the Hottentots ), later the language of the Sandawe (one of the Khoisan languages ) and the languages ​​of the Hamitic peoples. After his departure in 1911, he received a teaching position at the Hamburg Colonial Institute under Carl Meinhof , where he lectured on African and Melanesian languages . In 1914 he undertook private language studies in New Guinea. Surprised by the outbreak of war in August 1914, Dempwolff was called in by Governor Eduard Haber as chief military doctor. After the surrender, he and other German officials were taken to the Holdsworthy concentration camp near Liverpool on October 4, 1914 on the Berrima in Australia . From there it was shipped back to the Reich via San Francisco, where it went ashore on March 4, 1915 in Warnemünde . He was promoted to senior staff physician. The rest of the war he served as an army doctor in Saarbrücken. In 1915 he became a member of the "Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission" due to his expertise in the fields of medicine and African and Indonesian languages. The aim of the commission was to record the approximately 250 languages ​​spoken among the internees of the German prisoner-of-war camps.

On June 5, 1918 he was awarded the title of professor. After the war he finally worked as a private lecturer and associate professor at the University of Hamburg , where he was the head of the seminar for Indonesian and South Seas languages. On May 10, 1920, he completed his habilitation for African and South Sea languages. Until 1931 he was an associate professor. Subsequently, until 1938 he was a lecturer and head of the seminar for Indonesian and South Seas languages in Hamburg. In particular, he was one of the first to work on the reconstruction of the Ur-Austronesian .

Otto Dempwolff was buried in the Ohlsdorf cemetery in Hamburg, grid square W 32 ( Ida-Ehre-Allee , south of Chapel 6).

Awards

1899: 4th grade, with swords on a white ribbon and black edging
1910: 4th grade, with a royal crown

Fonts

  • The Sandawe, linguistic and ethnographic material from German East Africa , treatises of the Hamburg Colonial Institute , Volume XXXIV / Issue 19, L. Friederichsen, Hamburg 1916, 180 pages.
  • The equivalent of the Indonesian lip sounds in some other Austronesian languages , habilitation thesis, ZfES 2nd supplement, Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1920, 96 pages.
  • Comparative phonology of the Austronesian vocabulary , volume 1 Inductive structure of an Indonesian original language, ZfES 15. Supplement, Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1934, 124 pages.
  • Comparative phonology of the Austronesian vocabulary , Volume 2 Deductive application of Ur-Indonesian to Austronesian individual languages, ZfES 17. Supplement, Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1937, 194 pages.
  • Comparative phonology of the Austronesian vocabulary , Volume 3 Austronesian dictionary, ZfES 19. Supplement, Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1938, 192 pages.
  • Grammar of the Jabêm language in New Guinea , Treatises for Foreign Studies , Volume 50, L. Friederichsen, Hamburg 1939, 92 pages.
  • Introduction to the Malay language , ZfES 22nd supplement, Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1941, 86 pages.
  • Inductive structure of the Urbantu , ed. And edit . by L. Gerhardt and J. Roux. Köppe, Cologne 1998.
    • Report on a malaria expedition to German New Guinea, Zeitschrift für Hygiene 1904, pp. 81–132

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Max Mechow, Renowned CCER, Historia Academica, Volume 8/9, pp 39-40
  2. ^ Jürgen K. Mahrenholz: South Asian speech and music recordings in the sound archive of the Humboldt University in Berlin . 2020, p. 3 ( projekt-mida.de ).
  3. ↑ Celebrity Graves
personal data
SURNAME Dempwolff, Otto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dempwolff, Otto Heinrich Louis August (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German linguist and ethnologist
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Pillau
DATE OF DEATH November 27, 1938
Place of death Hamburg