Zoe Hauptová


Zoe Hauptová was a Czech slavicist, palaeologist, editor, translator, lecturer and editor of the Old Church Slavonic Dictionary.

Early life and education

Hauptová was born in the city of Brno, and lived for a few years in Moravské Budějovice in the Vysočina Region, before moving with her mother to Prague. She attended a French grammar school there, from which she graduated in 1948. She then began studying Czech and Polish at the Charles University Faculty of Arts, before expanding her studies to Slavic philology in general, and particularly Old Slavonic, under the influence of linguistics professors Bohuslav Havránek, Vladimír Skalička, Vladimír Šmilauer and others who taught in the faculty at that time. She also studied at the Linguistic Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. She earned a PhD in 1951, and a Candidate of Sciences in 1958.

Career

In 1952, Hauptová was appointed as a researcher in the Slavonic Linguistics Department of the Slavonic Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and began working on the Old Church Slavonic Dictionary, published as separate volumes, totalling more than 3,000 pages, between 1966–1997. She became its chief editor in 1972. She also worked on the Old Slavonic Etymological Dictionary and the Old Church Slavonic Monuments. From 1995–2003, she was president of the Commission for Church Slavonic Dictionaries within the International Committee of Slavicists.
She lectured in paleoslavic and comparative Slavonic linguistics at the Pedagogical Faculty of the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, where she obtained habilitation in 1990. She also taught at the Charles University in Prague. Two anthologies she co-edited, The Golden Age of Bulgarian Literature and The Writing of the Russian Middle Ages, are still indispensable for students of Slavic studies.
Among her research interests were general and comparative Slavonic studies; grammatical, lexicographic and textological studies of Old Church Slavonic; Slavic-Hungarian language relations, and Slavic history.

Selected publications

Her partner was painter and graphic artist Petra Fisherová. Hauptová sometimes worked as a lay preacher in the Czech Brethren church in Nejdek near Karlovy Vary. She died in Prague.