Hans Jakob Polotsky
Hans Jacob Polotsky (* September 13, 1905 in Zurich, † 10 August 1991, Jerusalem, and Hans Jakob Polotsky ) was an Israeli orientalist and linguist, professor of Semitic languages and Egyptology.
Life
Born the son of Russian Jewish parents in Zurich, Polotsky grew up in Berlin and studied at the University of Berlin and at the University of Göttingen Egyptology and Semitic Studies ( dissertation entitled to the inscriptions of the 11th dynasty at Hermann Kees ). During his stay in Göttingen he worked from 1926 to 1931 as an employee of the company's Greek Septuagint, Coptic, Syrian and Arab material. These texts brought him into contact with Turkic and Iranian languages . From spring 1933 until the end of 1934 he worked in Berlin at the Manichaean texts Edition, but he is not mentioned in the publication as a Jew. Apparently, in the spring of 1935 he fled from Germany and finds employment at the newly founded Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There he deepened his interest in, among other Ethiopian languages ( Ge'ez, Amharic, Gurage, Tigre and so on ), and was appointed professor in 1948. In 1965 he was awarded the Israel Prize for Humanities, 1982 Harvey Prize.
In Jerusalem he met speakers of neuostaramäischen language that had been neglected as a research topic for long. Since he also mastered Russian, among other things, he could use major Russian contributions in this area. Groundbreaking for the study of Coptic sentence structure, but also of the entire older Egyptian verbal system ("standard theory of Egyptian Verbal Syntax" ) were his Études de syntaxe copte (1944). In the field of linguistics, he was familiar with the theories of Noam Chomsky, but tended rather to the school of Ferdinand de Saussure. His Collected Papers were published in 1971 by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.