Hermann Collitz

Hermann Collitz (4 February 1855 – 13 May 1935) was a German historical linguist and Indo-Europeanist, who spent much of his career in the United States.

Biography

Born in Bleckede near Lüneburg in 1885.[1] Collitz received a doctorate in 1878 at the University of Göttingen with a dissertation on "The Emergence of the Indo-Iranian Palatal Series" (German: Die Entstehung der indoiranischen Palatalreihe), and his 1885 habilitation degree at the University of Halle for "The Inflection of Nouns with Threefold Gradation in Old Indic and in Greek: the Cases of the Singular" (German: Die Flexion der Nomina mit dreifacher Stammabstufung im Altindischen und im Griechischen – Die Casus des Singular).

In 1886, Collitz emigrated to the United States, where he taught at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia. In 1907, he moved to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he took up a chair in Germanic studies.[2] He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1902.[3]

In 1924, Collitz was elected the first president of the Linguistic Society of America.[4] In 1927, he officially retired from Johns Hopkins, but remained in Baltimore until his death in 1935.

On 13 August 1904, he married Klara Hechtenberg, a fellow German-born philologist.[5] Upon her death, in 1944, she left most of her estate to the Linguistic Society of America to found the Hermann and Klara H. Collitz Professorship in Comparative Philology.[6] She left her husband's papers to Johns Hopkins University.[7]

Selected works

He published:

  • Sammlung der griechischen Dialektinschriften (1884–1909; with Friedrich Bechtel)
  • Die Verwandtschaftsverhältnisse der griechischen Dialekte (1895)
  • Die neueste Sprachforschung (1886)

See also:

  • World Languages in PMLA, Vol. 40, Appendix (1925), pp. xliii-lv, published by Modern Language Association
  • "Hermann Collitz", in German Life magazine, December 2014/January 2015, p. 57

References
  1. German Marylanders: "Herman Collitz was born in the town of Bleckede, Hanover, Germany."
  2. Sehrt, Edward H. (1936). "Obituary: Hermann Collitz 1855-1935". Modern Language Notes. 51 (2): 69–80. ISSN 0149-6611. JSTOR 2912590.
  3. "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-05-19.
  4. "Presidents | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2019-07-18.
  5. "Collection: Klara Hechtenberg Collitz papers | Johns Hopkins University Libraries Archives Public Interface". archivesspace.library.jhu.edu. Retrieved 2019-07-18.
  6. "Past Linguistic Institutes: Named Professorships | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2019-07-18.
  7. "Collection: Hermann Collitz papers | Johns Hopkins University Libraries Archives Public Interface". aspace.library.jhu.edu. Retrieved 2019-07-18.
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