Walter Porzig

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Walter Porzig (born April 30, 1895 in Ronneburg , † October 14, 1961 in Mainz ) was a German linguist . He published mainly on Indo-European and linguistic topics.

Life

Walter Porzig was born as the son of the Reich judge Max Porzig . From 1907 to 1911 he attended the Königin-Carola-Gymnasium in Leipzig . After his participation in the First World War studied Porzig in Jena, Munich and Leipzig Philology . In 1921 he received his doctorate under Ferdinand Sommer at the University of Jena . The topic of his dissertation was " The syntactic function of the Coniunctivus Imperfecti in Old Latin ".

In 1922 Porzig became a private lecturer at the University of Leipzig . There he completed his habilitation in 1925 with Wilhelm Streitberg on the subject of “ Die Hypotaxe im Rigveda ”, in which he a. a. deals with the sound analysis methods of Eduard Sievers . In the same year he received a professorship at the University of Bern . There he was fired for Nazi activities.

In 1935 he switched jobs with his teacher Albert Debrunner in Jena. “Porzig was the head of the NSDAP's foreign organization in Bern , Debrunner was a declared opponent of National Socialism. The details of this spectacular change of chair have not yet been clarified, ”wrote historian Joachim Lerchenmueller . From 1941 Porzig was a professor at the " Reichsuniversität Strasbourg ", but he was mostly used in the military in Norway . Seconded to Jena in 1944, he headed a Volkssturm battalion in 1944/45 .

From April 1945 to July 1946 he was in Allied internment camps. In 1949, an arbitration chamber procedure classified him as a follower. Porzig became a professor in Mainz in 1951 . As a former “active National Socialist”, according to a discussion paper published in 2001, “there was not even any reason to assume that he had fundamentally reoriented himself politically after 1945”, although he had previously “not done linguistics as a political contract research”.

Porzig's main work The Miracle of Language on the Fundamentals of Linguistics was published in 1950. In the preface to the 5th edition, Heinz Rupp speaks of a “great success”. The book had nine editions by 1993 and was translated into Spanish (by Moralejo Lasso ) and Turkish.

Works (selection)

  • The syntactic function of the conjunctival imperfect in Old Latin. Diss. Jena 1921
  • Illuyankas and Typhon. In: Kleinasiatische Forschungen Vol. 1.3 (1930), pp. 379-386
  • The names for sentence contents in Greek and Indo-European. Berlin 1942 (= Studies on Indo-European Linguistics and Cultural Studies, Volume 10)
  • The miracle of language. Problems, methods and results of modern linguistics. Munich, Bern 1950 (= Dalp Collection, Volume 71)
  • The structure of the Indo-European language area. Heidelberg 1954

literature

  • Rüdiger Schmitt:  Walter Porzig. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , p. 645 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Walter Porzig, 1895–1961: Appreciation by the Philosophical Faculty of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Mainz 1962. Therein: Directory of the writings of Walter Porzig. Pp. 28-47.
  • on the essay Wesenhaftungsbezüge (1934): Eckard Rolf: Metaphertheorien. Typology, presentation, bibliography. Berlin 2005, pp. 61–65.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Johann Hauptmann: Alphabetical index of former Carolaner , in: Twenty-five anniversary of the Queen Carola high school in Leipzig 1927 , Leipzig 1927, p. 31
  2. ^ "Walter Porzig", by Helmut Humbach, in: Gnomon, 34th Volume, Issue 4, 1962
  3. ^ "Walter Porzig", by Helmut Humbach, in: Gnomon, 34th Volume, Issue 4, 1962
  4. ↑ Joachim Lerchenmueller: The Reich University of Strasbourg: SD science policy and academic careers before and after 1945. In: Karen Bayer, Frank Sparing, Wolfgang Woelk: Universities and colleges in National Socialism and in the early post-war period. Stuttgart 2004, p. 73, note 82. See also: Joachim Lerchenmueller, Gerd Simon: In the run-up to the mass murder. German studies and minor subjects in World War II. An overview. Tübingen, 3rd edition 1997, p. 114 f.
  5. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 470.
  6. ^ Karen Bayer, Frank Sparing, Wolfgang Woelk: Universities and colleges in National Socialism and in the early post-war period. Stuttgart 2004, p. 73
  7. ↑ Glottopedia
  8. ↑ Gerd Simon: “Against the Utz masses in the history of linguistics.” In: Journal for Germanistic Linguistics. Vol. 18 (1990), pp. 81-94, here p. 84. Quoted from: Klaas-Hinrichs Ehlers: Structuralism in German Linguistics. The reception of the Prague school between 1926 and 1945. Berlin 2005, p. 234 f.
  9. ↑ Clemens Knobloch: Willing Executors? or: historiography as a weapon and tool. In: Contributions to the history of linguistics. Vol. 11 (2001) pp. 277-285, here p. 279
  10. ↑ Quoted from the 8th edition Tübingen 1986
personal data
SURNAME Porzig, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German linguist
DATE OF BIRTH April 30, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Ronneburg
DATE OF DEATH October 14, 1961
Place of death Mainz