Zoltán Gombocz (18 June 1877 – 2 May 1935) was a Hungarian scholar specializing in

Finno-Ugric languages Finno-Ugric ( or ; ''Fenno-Ugric'') or Finno-Ugrian (''Fenno-Ugrian''), is a traditional grouping of all languages in the Uralic language family except the Samoyedic languages. Its formerly commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is ...

, but also in

Turkic languages The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turkic l ...

Life and career

Gombocz was born in Ödenburg/Sopron, and spent his early years there, where his father was a professor at an evangelical college. He studied

philology Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as th ...

, which also included

Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...

, under the linguists Josef Szinnyei, August Ph. Becker and also Zsigmund Simonyi at Budapest University, and through them absorbed the principles of the Junggrammatiker. Szinnyei's diplomacy is said to have been decisive in influencing Gombocz's decision to concentrate on languages related to Hungary's historic roots. he obtained his doctorate in 1900. He studied abroad, under the Jesuit linguist

Jean-Pierre Rousselot Jean-Pierre Rousselot (14 October 1846, Saint-Claud – 16 December 1924, Paris) was a French priest who was an important phonetician and dialectologist. Rousselot is considered the founder of experimental phonetics, both theoretical and applied ...

at the

Collège de France The Collège de France (), formerly known as the ''Collège Royal'' or as the ''Collège impérial'' founded in 1530 by François I, is a higher education and research establishment ('' grand établissement'') in France. It is located in Paris n ...

in Paris, in Germany over 1903/4 in

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...

where he came under the influence of

Hermann Paul Hermann Otto Theodor Paul (August 7, 1846, Salbke – December 29, 1921, Munich) was a German philologist, linguist and lexicographer. Biography He studied at Berlin and Leipzig, and in 1874 became professor of German language and literatu ...

and Wilhelm Wundt, and in Finland where he mastered

Finnish Finnish may refer to: * Something or someone from, or related to Finland * Culture of Finland * Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland * Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people * Finnish cuisine See also ...

. He took up appointments successively thereafter as Professor of Finno-Ugric languages at

Kolozsvár ; hu, kincses város) , official_name=Cluj-Napoca , native_name= , image_skyline= , subdivision_type1 = County , subdivision_name1 = Cluj County , subdivision_type2 = Status , subdivision_name2 = County seat , settlement_type = City , l ...

and

Szeged Szeged ( , ; see also other alternative names) is the third largest city of Hungary, the largest city and regional centre of the Southern Great Plain and the county seat of Csongrád-Csanád county. The University of Szeged is one of the m ...

, and was appointed chair of the subject in Budapest in 1921, where he rose to become rector in 1927 of the most prestigious institution of learning in his country, Eötvös Loránd University. Aside from writing a key modern text on Hungarian, ''An Outline of a Historical Hungarian Grammnar'', Gombocz tackled one of the most recondite problems of his discipline the reconstruction of the ancient vowel and vowel-ablaut system of proto-Finno-Ugrian, which, together with the work of his Finnish colleague Eemil Nestor Setälä, put Finno-Ugrian

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

on a firm scientific basis. Together with his friend and colleague Melich János, Gombocz compiled a comprehensive etymological dictionary of Hungarian, the first scientific work of its kind for one of the Finno-Ugrian languages. Gombocz also mastered

Turkology Turkology (or Turcology or Turkic studies) is a complex of humanities sciences studying languages, history, literature, folklore, culture, and ethnology of people speaking Turkic languages and Turkic peoples in chronological and comparative cont ...

and made fundamental contributions to the topic, writing important papers on the analysis of Turkic loan-words into Hungarian.

Death and tributes

Gombocz died of a seizure during a faculty meeting, at the early age of 58, and was mourned by his peers as one of the two outstanding ''altmeister'' of Finno-Ugric studies of his time, the other being Setälä, who had died earlier in February, the same year.

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* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Gombocz, Zoltan 1877 births 1935 deaths Hungarian Finno-Ugrists