Hermann Collitz
Hermann Collitz was an eminent German historical linguist and Indo-Europeanist, who spent much of his career in the United States.Biography
He received the doctorate in 1878 at the University of Göttingen with a dissertation on "The Emergence of the Indo-Iranian Palatal Series", and his 1885 habilitation 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".
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, where he took up a chair in Germanic studies.
In 1924, Collitz was elected the first 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, 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.He published:
- Sammlung der griechischen Dialektinschriften.
- Die Verwandtschaftsverhältnisse der griechischen Dialekte.
- Die neueste Sprachforschung.
See also:
