'Oswald Szemerényi' (born
7 September 1913 in
London;died
29 December 1996 in
Freiburg) was a
Hungarian Indo-Europeanist with strong interests in
comparative linguistics in general.
He was educated in
Hungary, at
Eötvös College, and he studied at the universities of
Heidelberg and
Berlin. He was influenced by Hungarian linguist
Gyula Laziczius. In 1942 he was appointed lecturer in Greek at
Budapest University. In 1944 he habilitated with a thesis on
Balto-Slavic unity, and in 1947 he was appointed professor of comparative Indo-European linguistics in Budapest. He returned to England in
1948, where he worked for
Bedford College until 1960. He was professor of linguistics at
Freiburg University from 1965 to
1981. He founded the Freiburg Linguistics Circle, influenced by the
Budenz Circle, led by
Josef Budenz, the founder of
Finno-Ugric studies.
Selected bibliography
★ 1960 ''Studies in the Indo-European System of Numerals'', Heidelberg
★
1964 ''Syncope in Greek and Indo-European and the Nature of Indo-European Accent'', Napoli
★ 1970 ''Einführung in die vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft'', Darmstadt
★
★
1989 3., vollständig neu bearbeitete Auflage
★
★ 1996 ''Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics'', Oxford
★ ''Richtungen der modernen Sprachwissenschaft''
★
★
1971 ''Teil I: Von
Saussure bis
Bloomfield, 1916-1950'', Heidelberg
★
★ 1982 ''Teil II: Die fünfziger Jahre, 1950-1960'', Heidelberg
★
1972 ''Comparative Linguistics'' (Current Trends of Linguistics)
★ 1977 ''Studies in the Kinship Terminology of the Indo-European Languages'', Leiden
★
1980 ''Four Old Iranian Ethnic Names: Scythian - Skudra - Sogdian - Saka'', Vienna
★ ''Scripta Minora: selected essays in Indo-European, Greek, and Latin'', edited by Patrick Considine and James T. Hooker, Innsbruck,
★
★ 1987 Vol. I: ''Indo-European''
★
★
1987 Vol. II: ''Latin''
★
★ 1987 Vol. III: ''Greek''
★
★
1991 Vol. IV: ''Indo-European Languages other than Latin and Greek'' (1991)
★
1989 ''An den Quellen des lateinischen Wortschatzes'', Innsbruck
Literature
★ ''Prehistory, History, and Historiography of Language, Speech, and Linguistic Theory. (Papers in Honor of Oswald Szemerényi)'' (Amsterdam/Philadelpia 1992)
★ ''Historical Philology. Papers in Honor of Oswald Szemerényi II ''(Amsterdam/Philadelpia
1992)
★ ''Comparative-Historical Linguistics: Indo-European and Finno-Uralic. Papers in Honor of Oswald Szemerényi III'' (Amsterdam/Philadelpia 1993)
External links
★ http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/personal/galeria/szemeren.htm