Otto Prince

Otto Prinz (born August 2, 1905 in Seehausen ; † February 19, 2003 in Munich ) was a German philologist and longstanding editor-in-chief of the “ Middle Latin Dictionary ” project in Munich.

Act

After attending the municipal high school in Halle / Saale from 1915 to 1924, Otto Prinz studied classical philology and Romance studies at the university there; from 1928 he completed his studies in Grenoble, France . He then received his doctorate in Halle in 1932 with the thesis "De o et u vocalibus inter se permutatis in lingua Latina quaestiones epigraphicae" (epigraphic studies on the interchanging of the vowels o and u in the Latin language).

Prinz, who had worked at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (ThLL) in Munich since 1932/33 (initially as a scholarship holder of the Rockefeller Foundation ) , was appointed by Johannes Stroux in October 1939 to set up the office for the Middle Latin dictionary, which was created by the cartel of the German academies had just been re-established. The job, which was mainly supervised and financed by the Prussian Academy of Sciences , was located at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich because of the need to use the ThLL's resources . Since Prinz was called up for military service in December 1939 and then, apart from an interruption from July 1940 to March 1942, was prevented from continuing work on the dictionary due to military service and later imprisonment, the company made little progress for the time being. At least during this time, Prinz worked out a guideline for excerpting Middle Latin texts and a provisional list of citations (1941).

After returning from Soviet captivity in the autumn of 1948, Prinz was able to quickly resume work on the dictionary and gradually build up a successful job. This was joined in 1950 by another job at the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, which was headed by Johannes Schneider . By briefing the leader and instructing the working group in East Berlin, as well as the later fair cooperation with Schneider, Prinz earned special merits. After a period of several years, in which the extensive text corpus was searched for conspicuous documents worth registering and the design of the future lexicon articles was tested, the development of the dictionary articles was started in 1957/58; In 1959 the first delivery appeared. In cooperation with the Berlin editor, Prinz succeeded in organizing the article production in such a way that a fascicle could appear annually. When he left the management of the company in 1970, there were 13 fascicles. He worked in the editorial office until 1976.

In spite of the strict requirements of the dictionary commission of the participating academies, Prinz exerted considerable influence on the character and shape of the resulting lexicon by creating facts in continuous practical work that resulted in a substantial modification of the company's original objectives. Instead of the planned two-volume dictionary, which should concentrate on new Medieval Latin formations and semantic changes, a large, multi-volume dictionary of medieval Latin is now being developed, which emulates the model of the ThLL and has received broad academic recognition. In addition to the dictionary work, Prinz devoted himself to the edition of texts whose Latinity deviates considerably from the norms of Classical Latin ( Vulgar Latin ).

Fonts

• Itinerarium Egeriae (Peregrinatio Aetheriae) . Edited by Otto Prince. 5. rework. u. exp. Aufl. Heidelberg 1960. (Collection of vulgar Latin texts 1).
• Middle Latin »bibicus«. Notes on the vocabulary of Paulinus of Aquileja . In: Orbis mediævalis. Festgabe for Anton Blaschke ..., ed. v. Horst Gericke, Manfred Lemmer and Walther Zöllner, Weimar 1970, pp. 211–222.
• On the influence of Greek on the vocabulary of Middle Latin. In: Johanne Autenrieth , Franz Brunhölzl , Festschrift Bernhard Bischoff ..., Stuttgart 1971, pp. 1–15.
• The revision of Regino's Chronicle from a linguistic point of view. In: Literature and Language in the European Middle Ages, ed. v. Alf Önnerfors , Darmstadt (Scientific Book Society) 1973, pp. 122–141.
• An early occidental update of the Latin translation of the Pseudo-Methodio. In: German Archive for Research into the Middle Ages 41/1, 1985, pp. 1–23.
• Notes on the vocabulary of the Latin translation of the Pseudo-Methodio. In: Variorum munera florum. ... Festschrift for Hans F. Haefele ..., ed. v. Adolf Reinle , Ludwig Schmugge and Peter Stotz, Sigmaringen 1985, pp. 17-22.
• For the lexical evaluation of the two oldest Vitae sanctae Wiboradae. In: Ibid. 42.1, 1986, s. 206-212.
• The cosmography of Aethicus. Munich 1993 (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, sources on the intellectual history of the Middle Ages 14).
• Wolfgang Buchwald, Armin Hohlweg, Otto Prinz: Tusculum Lexicon of Greek and Latin Authors of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. 3. edit again. u. exp. Edition Munich 1982. (French edition: Dictionnaire des auteurs grecs et latins de l'Antiquité et du Moyen Âge. Turnhout 1991).

literature

• Peter Stotz : Obituary Otto Prinz (1905–2003). A pioneer of Middle Latin lexicography. In: Akademie-Aktuell (Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Munich) 02/2003, issue 10, p. 24. as PDF, 1.4 MB