Wytze Gerbens Hellinga (20 December, 1908 Haarlem - 16 March, 1985

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

) was a

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

professor of

linguistics Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...

at the

University of Amsterdam The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, nl, Universiteit van Amsterdam) is a public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The UvA is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other being ...

. Hellinga was the son of Gerben Hellinga, a school master and Taatske Zwart, a writer of children's books. Whilst his father adhered to the strict

Dutch Reformed Church The Dutch Reformed Church (, abbreviated NHK) was the largest Christian denomination in the Netherlands from the onset of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century until 1930. It was the original denomination of the Dutch Royal Family and ...

his mother was a militant socialist and friend of

Nienke van Hichtum Sjoukje Maria Diderika Troelstra-Bokma de Boer (13 February 1860 – 9 January 1939), better known under her pseudonym Nienke van Hichtum, was a well-known Frisian Dutch children's author and translator. From 1888 to 1904, she was married t ...

, who encouraged her in her career. Hellinga completed his doctorate on the pronunciation of the

Dutch language Dutch ( ) is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-Europea ...

in 1938 at the University of Amsterdam. He had been supervised by

Willem Jacob Verdenius Willem Jacob Verdenius (3 April 1913 – 23 June 1998) was a Dutch classicist. Life Born at The Hague on 3 April 1913, he completed his PhD thesis on Parmenides at Utrecht University in 1942. He became Professor of Greek language and literature at ...

. He was later appointed professor at the University in 1946. He remained at the university until his retirement in 1979. He discovered the only known extant copy of

Joos Lambrecht Joos Lambrecht (1491, Ghent – 1556/7, Wesel) was a Walloon people, Walloon Printer (publishing), printer, typographer, lexicographer and linguist. He was the son of Jan Lambrecht and came from a family of engravers of seals and marks used to aut ...

's sixteenth century first edition of the ''Naembouck'' (1547) in the library of the Groot Seminarie

Warmond Warmond () is a village and former municipality in the Western Netherlands, north of Leiden in the province of South Holland. The municipality covered an area of 14.42 km² (5.57 mile², 30.7%) of which 4.42 km² (1.71 mile²) is water; ...

. In 1973 he married

Lotte Hellinga Lotte Hellinga, FBA (née Querido, born 1932) is a book historian and expert in early printing. She is an authority on the work of William Caxton. Early life Lotte Hellinga was born in 1932. She studied at the University of Amsterdam under Wyt ...

, a former student of his. They had co-authored the book ''The fifteenth-century printing types of the Low Countries'' published in 1966.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hellinga, Wytze Gerbens 1908 births 1985 deaths Linguists from the Netherlands Dutch philologists