Hermann Collitz (4 February 1855 – 13 May 1935) was an eminent
German historical linguist and
Indo-Europeanist, who spent much of his career in the
United States.
Biography
Born in
Bleckede near
Lüneburg in
1885
Events
January–March
* January 3– 4 – Sino-French War – Battle of Núi Bop: French troops under General Oscar de Négrier defeat a numerically superior Qing Chinese force, in northern Vietnam.
* January 4 – ...
. 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
Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in many European countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excellence in research, teaching and further education, usually including a ...
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
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic, and the 30th most populous city in the United States with a population of 585,708 in 2020. Baltimore was ...
, where he took up a chair in Germanic languages, Germanic studies. He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1902.
In 1924, Collitz was elected the first List of presidents of the Linguistic Society of America, president of the Linguistic Society of America. 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 Collitz, Klara Hechtenberg, a fellow German-born philologist. 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. She left her husband's papers to Johns Hopkins University.
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 Languagesin ''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
External links
Catalogus Professorum Halensis (biography in German)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Collitz, Hermann
1855 births
1935 deaths
Linguists from the United States
Linguists from Germany
People from Bleckede
Linguistic Society of America presidents
Presidents of the Modern Language Association