#OTD 211 years ago, Rudolf von Raumer (1815–1876) was born 🎂 A philologist and historical linguist, specialising in German phonology and dialectology, he actively participated in the 19th-century debates about reforming German orthography.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 142 years ago, Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) was born 🎉 He was a proponent of the functionalist approach of the London School, known for introducing the concept of phatic communion, the use of language to build social bonds rather than exchange information.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 159 years ago, Holger Pedersen (1867–1953) was born 🥳 He was an Indo-Europeanist, specialising in Irish and Albanian, who formulated the so-called Pedersen’s Law and the ruki sound law. He was also a proponent of the Nostratic family.
#Histlx #LinguisticBirthdays
#OTD 139 years ago, Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949) was born 🎉 He was an expert in Algonquian and Austronesian languages and an American structuralist who co-founded the Linguistic Society of America (@lingsocam.bsky.social) in 1924 and served as its president in 1935.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 133 years ago, Emma Adelaide Hahn (1893–1967) was born 🥳 She was an expert in Latin grammar and Indo-European linguistics. In 1946, she became the first female president of the Linguistic Society of America (@lingsocam.bsky.social).
#WomenInLinguistics #LinguisticBirthdays
#OTD 200 years ago, Friedrich Staub (1826–1896) was born 🎉 He is best known as a dialectologist and lexicographer, and the founder of the Swiss German Dictionary (@ch-idiotikon.bsky.social). A sound law in the Alemannic dialects of German, known as Staub’s Law, bears his name.
#LinguisticBirthdays
#OTD 149 years ago, Wilhelm Doegen (1877–1967) was born 🥳 He was an specialist in phonetics and phonology and he invented the so-called Doegen Lautapparat in 1909 and recorded the speech and songs of prisoners of war in multiple languages during World War I.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 186 years ago, Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) was born 🎂 A general linguist and Sinology scholar, he was in many ways a forerunner of structuralism. Among other things, he formulated a spiral model of language change, also known as the agglutinative theory.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 177 years ago, Karl Brugmann (1849–1919) was born 🎂 An expert on Sanskrit and comparative Indo-European linguistics, he was one of the most prominent Neogrammarians, who argued that sound laws operate without exceptions. Brugmann’s Law is named after him.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 181 years ago, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929) was born 🎉 An expert in Slavic languages and a member of the Kazan linguistic school, he was one of the scholars responsible for the modern concept of the phoneme. He nearly became President of Poland in 1922.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 135 years ago, Yevgeny D. Polivanov (1891–1938) was born 🎉 An orientalist, translator, and expert in Chinese, Japanese, Uzbek, and Dungan, he helped develop writing systems for previously unwritten languages of the Soviet Union. He was executed by the NKVD in 1938.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 254 years ago, Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) was born 🥳 With the publication of "Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier" (1808), he became one of the founding figures of Indo-European studies. A street in Berlin is named after him (and his brother).
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 154 years ago, Cinie Louw (1872–1935) was born 🎉 She was a missionary, translator, and linguist active in present-day Zimbabwe. In her linguistic work, she specialised in the Shona language, particularly the Karanga variety.
#WomenInLinguistics #Histlx #LinguisticBirthdays
#OTD 83 years ago, Norbert Dittmar (1943–2025) was born 🎉 A pioneer of German sociolinguistics, he studied, among other things, the language of migrants. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he compiled a corpus of interviews with East and West Berliners.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 89 years ago, Annegret Bollée (1937-2021) was born 🥳 A classicist, Romanist, and pioneering scholar of (German) creolistics, she was an expert on French-based creoles, particularly those of the Indian Ocean, such as Seychelles Creole and Réunion Creole.
#LinguisticBirthdays #WomenInLinguistics
#OTD 233 years ago, Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) was born 🥳 A classicist, translator, and textual critic, he formulated the so-called Lachmann’s Law and proposed a normalized Classical Middle High German, a written variety that disregarded dialectal and other differences.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 161 years ago, Elise Richter (1865–1943) was born 🎂 A specialist in Romance linguistics and phonetics, she became Austria’s first woman to obtain a Habilitation (1905) and its first female professor (1921). She died in 1943 in Theresienstadt.
#WomenInLinguistics #Histlx #LinguisticBirthdays
#OTD 174 years ago, Georg Wenker (1852–1911) was born 🎉 He was a pioneering dialectologist, an expert in linguistic geography and the founder of the German Language Atlas. He distributed tens of thousands of questionnaires to map the many dialects spoken across Germany.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 215 years ago, Ferdinand Nesselmann (1811–1881) was born 🎉 He was an orientalist and also an expert on the history of mathematics. Later in his career, he studied Old Prussian, Latvian, and Lithuanian, and in 1845, he coined the term “Baltic languages” for them.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 240 years ago, Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) was born 🎂 He was a pioneer in the study of German language and literature, as well as an editor, publisher and expert in runology. Together with his older brother Jacob, he is best known for their collection of fairy tales.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 171 years ago, Maurice Bloomfield (1855–1928) was born 🎉 He was a comparative linguist and a student of comparative mythology. As a specialist in Sanskrit, he translated Vedic texts into English. His nephew, Leonard, was also a linguist.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 176 years ago, Wilhelm Braune (1850–1926) was born 🎉 He was a historical linguist, a Neogrammarian, and a specialist in Old High German and Gothic. In 1873, he co-founded the journal "Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur" together with Hermann Paul.
#LinguisticBirthdays
#OTD 205 years ago, August Schleicher (1821–1868) was born 🥳 He was an expert on the history of Indo-European languages, renowned for introducing tree diagrams to illustrate relationships within language families and for composing fables about sheep and horses.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 90 years ago, Renate Steinitz (1936–2019) was born 🥳 She was a member of the East German Academy of Sciences and worked on German grammar. She also edited several of her father’s works on the Khanty language and wrote about her family history.
#WomenInLinguistics #Histlx #LinguisticBirthdays
#OTD 140 years ago, Maria Klingenheben-von Tiling (1886–1974) was born 🎉 She specialised in the Cushitic and Bantu languages of Africa, including Somali and Swahili, respectively. She was also active at the Hamburg Colonial Institute.
#WomenInLinguistics #LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 115 years ago, Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1911–2010) was born 🥳 An expert in phonetics, phonology, and linguistic geography, she was a member of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen and of the Danish resistance movement during the Second World War.
#WomenInLinguistics #LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 199 years ago, William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) was born 🎂 A scholar of Sanskrit and the Vedas, he championed an evidence-based approach to linguistics. He argued that language is a social institution, not an organism nor a direct expression of its speakers’ Volksgeist.
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#OTD 184 years ago, Hugo Schuchardt (1842–1927) was born 🎉 He was a specialist in Romance historical linguistics, an expert on Basque, and a pioneer of creole studies, he was a leading critic of Neogrammarian ideas and a prominent advocate of the wave model.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 112 years ago, Felicitas D. Goodman (1914–2005) was born 🎉 She was an expert in both anthropology and linguistics. In her work, she focused particularly on researching the phenomenon of glossolalia in Pentecostal communities in Mexico.
#WomenInLinguistics #LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
#OTD 165 years ago, Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke (1861–1936) was born 🥳 A historical-comparative linguist, a member of the Neogrammarian school, and an expert on the history of the Romance languages. He was the nephew of the Swiss novelist Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–1898).
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx
