Gabriel Altmann (24 May 1931 – 2 March 2020) was a Slovak-German

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

and mathematician. He made significant contributions to the field of

quantitative linguistics Quantitative linguistics (QL) is a sub-discipline of general linguistics and, more specifically, of mathematical linguistics. Quantitative linguistics deals with language learning, language change, and application as well as structure of natural ...

. He is best known for co-developing Menzerath's law, also known as the Menzerath-Altmann law, which describes the relationship between the size of a linguistic construct and the size of its linguistic constituents.

Biography

Altmann was born on 24 May 1931 in Poltár,

Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...

. He spent much of his career as a professor at

Ruhr University Bochum The Ruhr University Bochum (, ) is a public research university located in the southern hills of the central Ruhr area, Bochum, Germany. It was founded in 1962 as the first new public university in Germany after World War II. Instruction began ...

in Germany. Over his long career, Altmann authored numerous books and articles focused on

. He served as the founding editor of the book series ''Quantitative Linguistics'', which publishes works on all aspects of quantitative methods and models in linguistics. He was also on the editorial boards of several journals in the field, such as ''Journal of Quantitative Linguistics''. Altmann made key contributions to establishing the fundamental principles of quantitative linguistics. In addition to his work on Menzerath's law, he helped develop a unified derivation of several linguistic laws. His research applied mathematical and statistical methods to analyze various facets of language, from word length distributions to syntactic structures.

Works

* ''Einführung in die quantitative Lexikologie'' (1980) * ''Wiederholungen in Texten'' (1988) * ''Quantitative Linguistics: An International Handbook'' (2005)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Altmann, Gabriel 1931 births 2020 deaths Slovak mathematicians German mathematicians People from Poltár Linguists from Czechoslovakia 20th-century linguists 21st-century German linguists 20th-century German mathematicians 21st-century mathematicians Academic staff of Ruhr University Bochum

Biography

Works

See also

References