Walther von Wartburg
Walther von Wartburg ( Boos ) ( born May 18, 1888 in Ried wood, Canton Solothurn, † August 15 1971 in Basel) was a Swiss linguist and philologist.
Life and work
After studies at the Universities of Bern, Zurich, Florence and at the Sorbonne in Paris, he received his doctorate in 1912 in Zurich with a thesis on " The expressions for the error of the visual organ in the Romance languages and dialects. A semasiological investigation "and in 1921 became Privatdozent in Berne. After an appeal to Lausanne he taught from 1929 to 1939 at the University of Leipzig, where he held his 1931 inaugural lecture on the interlocking of descriptive and historical linguistics. From 1940 to 1959 he was Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Basel. In between he built in 1947 in East Berlin at the Humboldt University Romanistics again, their importance to the preservation of Western cultural tradition in the East he rated high.
His life's work is the very extensive French Etymological Dictionary (FEW ), an encyclopedia of the origin, history and changing significance of all words in the French vocabulary, including Gallo-Roman idioms such as Occitan or Frankoprovenzalische.
In 1943, supported the Working Group Pro Helvetia, the Swiss National Science Foundation from 1952 the ambitious project and with the 1993 and the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. The FEW was completed in 2002 and consists of 25 volumes with 160 fascicles and over 17,000 pages. The current abridged edition is the Dictionnaire de la langue française étymologique (2009, ISBN 978-2-13-056621-2 ).
Walther von Wartburg honorary degrees from the Universities of Lausanne and Leeds. In 1963 he was admitted to the German order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts.
His son Wolfgang was also humanists.
Work at FEW
At the start of work on the Wartburg FEW his wife and mother were his only assistant. They helped him to transfer the contents of over 1000 dialect dictionaries on slips of paper. About the later period wrote of Romance Kurt Baldinger:
" Wartburg house on the wooden brother at Basel was a research center of international renown. Wartburg even slept in a small room which contained rather resembled a monk's cell and only huge list boxes with well over a million leaflets and a scanty bed. "