Otto Hoffmann (Linguist)

Otto Hoffmann

Otto Hoffmann (born February 9, 1865 in Hanover ; † June 6, 1940 in Münster ) was a German linguist ( Indo-Europeanist ) and politician . From 1921 to 1933 he was a DNVP member of the Prussian state parliament .

Life

Otto Hoffmann, the son of a Prussian administrative officer, attended the Hanover Lyceum and studied linguistics at the University of Göttingen from 1883 to 1888 . There he was particularly influenced by August Fick , who began Hoffmann's lifelong study of the Greek dialects. In 1888 Hoffmann was awarded a PhD with a dissertation written in Latin on mixed Greek dialects. phil. doctorate and moved to the University of Königsberg , where he joined the following year with an in-depth study of the Indo-European verbal system habilitated .

In 1896 Hoffmann was appointed associate professor in Königsberg. In the same year he moved to the University of Breslau in the same capacity , where he took the chair of his doctoral supervisor Fick. It was not until 1907 that Hoffmann was appointed full professor. In 1908 the Society of Sciences in Athens made him an honorary member. In 1909 he received a call to the University of Münster , which he followed. Hoffmann was already politically active in Breslau. He was a member of the Wroclaw City Council and also acted as chairman of the Silesian regional association of the “General German School Association”, better known by its later name “Association for Germans Abroad”. At the same time he showed an interest in housing and settlement issues and became the second chairman of the Wroclaw Suburb Association.

During the First World War Hoffmann belonged to a group of professors at the University of Münster who advocated pan-German and annexionist politics. He was a founding member and member of the Reich Executive Committee of the German Fatherland Party , to which his fellow high school graduate Alfred Hugenberg belonged. With this he joined the newly founded German National People's Party in 1918 .

After the end of the war, Hoffmann was one of the founders of the German National People's Party and from 1918 to 1933 he was chairman of the DNVP regional association North Westphalia. In February 1921 he was elected as a member of the Prussian Landtag for the constituency of Weser-Ems , to which he belonged until the corporation was dissolved in 1933. He was also a member of the Westphalian Provincial Parliament and the City Council of Münster. Until the beginning of the 1930s he also headed the Münster DNVP local group.

In the academic year 1925/1926 Hoffmann acted as rector of the Westphalian Wilhelms University of Münster. For a long time he was the second chairman of the Society for the Promotion of the Westphalian Wilhelms University of Münster. He distinguished himself as a great promoter of physical fitness. When he reached the legal age limit, he retired in 1933 . He was positive about National Socialism .

The Westphalian Wilhelms University awarded Hoffmann an honorary doctorate from its medical and law faculties (1930 and 1935).

Services

Hoffmann's commitment to politics and the University of Münster contrasts with his life's work as a researcher and academic teacher. He stands in the tradition of the linguist Heinrich Ludolf Ahrens , whom he already got to know as a school principal and teacher in Hanover. After his highly acclaimed qualification writings, Hoffmann edited the oracle inscriptions of Dodona (1890) for the Collitz and Bechtel collection and wrote a three-volume compendium on the Greek dialects in their historical context (1891–1898). With this work, Hoffmann had made a name for himself a few years after his studies in linguistics; to them he owed his steep academic career.

His other work focused on Greek dialect inscriptions, Latin grammar and the phonology of the German language . His study of the Macedonians of antiquity (1906), which for the first time summarizes the language and ethnicity of this tribe, is of particular importance . Hoffmann was supported in this work by his Breslau colleagues Franz Skutsch , Conrad Cichorius and Eduard Norden .

Fonts

• De mixtis Graecae linguae dialectis. Dissertation. Goettingen 1888.
• The presence of the Indo-European basic language in its inflection and stem formation. Habilitation thesis. Goettingen 1889.
• A reorganization of Greek teaching, especially elementary teaching. Goettingen 1889.
• The Greek dialects in their historical connection with the most important of their sources. Three volumes. Göttingen 1891–1898.
• History of the Greek language. I. Until the end of classical times. Berlin, Leipzig 1911. 2nd edition 1916. 3rd edition: Edited by Albert Debrunner , Berlin 1953 (Göschen collection).
• The Sicilian inscriptions and the mercenary inscriptions of Abu-Simbel. In: Collitz – Bechtel: Collection of Greek dialect inscriptions. Volume 3,2,4, 1904, No. 425-489.
• Storytelling. 5th edition, Voigtländer, Leipzig 1908 (digitized version)
• Grammar and word index for the Megarian inscriptions. In: Collitz – Bechtel: Collection of Greek dialect inscriptions. 4,3, 1910, No. 333-376.
• Grammar and word index for the Rhodian inscriptions. In: Collitz – Bechtel: Collection of Greek dialect inscriptions. 4,3, 1910, No. 579-675.
• with Paul Gärtchen: addenda, grammar and word index to the inscriptions of Laconia, Tarent, Herakleia, Messenia, Thera, Cyrene and Melos. The most important Ionic inscriptions with additions and corrections to Bechtel's collection that have been added since 1905. Grammar and word index for the Ionic inscriptions . In: Collitz – Bechtel: Collection of Greek dialect inscriptions. 4,4,1-2, 1911-1914, No. 677-1028.
• The Macedonians, their language and their nationality. Göttingen 1906. Reprinted in Hildesheim, New York 1977.

literature

• Ernst Schwentner: Otto Hoffmann's literary activity 1888–1935. In: Indo-European Yearbook. 20, 1936, pp. 354-357 (list of publications).
• Karl H. Meyer: Otto Hoffmann. In: Indo-European Yearbook. 25, 1942, pp. 385-390 (with picture).
• Ernst Schwentner: Otto Hoffmann. In: Annual report on the progress of classical antiquity. 280, 1942, Nekrologe, pp. 35-48.
• Gerhard Baader :  Hoffmann, Otto. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7 , p. 436 ( digitized version ).
• Beatrix Herlemann , Helga Schatz: Biographical Lexicon of Lower Saxony Parliamentarians 1919–1945 (= publications of the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen. Volume 222). Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hannover 2004, ISBN 3-7752-6022-6 , p. 162.
• Helmut Lensing: Art. Hoffmann, Otto, Prof. Dr., in: Study Society for Emsländische Regionalgeschichte (Ed.): Emsländische Geschichte, Vol. 10, Haselünne 2003, pp. 315–321.
• Christian Tilitzki : The Albertus University of Königsberg. Its history from the founding of the Empire to the fall of the Province of East Prussia (1871–1945). Volume 1: 1871-1918, Oldenbourg Verlag, 2012. p. 551.
• Karin Jaspers / Wilfried Reinighaus: Westphalian-Lippian candidates in the January elections in 1919. A biographical documentation , Münster: Aschendorff 2020 (Publications of the Historical Commission for Westphalia - New Series; 52), ISBN 9783402151365 , p. 91.

Web links

Wikisource: Otto Hoffmann  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by Otto Hoffmann in the catalog of the German National Library
• In the inventory overview information on Otto Hoffmann's estate in the university archive of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

predecessor	Office	successor
Georg Grützmacher	Rector of the University of Münster 1925–1926	Karl Lux