Hartmut Katz

Hartmut Katz (born July 9, 1943, Stuttgart, September 26, 1996, Munich) is a German linguist. Life and work

Katz was interested in linguistics in the school years, when he attended an intensive secondary school in Landshut, and then in Munich, where he passed intensive Latin and Greek courses at the junior high school (1953-1962). At first he studied classical philology at the Ludwik and Maximilian University in Munich, and at the University of Albrecht and Ludwig in Freiburg, but after a year he decided to go to the Indo-European studies as a major and an indology and hetitology as minorities.

In 1965 he went privately for a month to Dublin to study there under Ernst Lewy (1881-1966). After his return to Munich from 1966, he studied under the philosophy of Wolfgang Schlachter, a part of his biography, which he also performed in Budapest. After graduating in 1971, he was unable to find employment for some time, until he became an assistant in the Institut für Finnougristik in Vienna, where he remained for two years. He habilitated in Munich in 1986 and earned his living by taking temporary lectures at various universities (Regensburg, Salzburg, Vienna, Cologne), but always returned to Munich eventually.

The greatest and most important of his work appeared in print only after the sudden (though preceded by severe illness) death: Studien zu den älteren indoiranischen Lehnwörtern in den uralischen Sprachen, ed. A. Widmer, P. Widmer, G. Klumpp (Heidelberg 2003, 354 pp.). The remainder of his work consists of only 79 titles, but these are works that have earned him an international reputation. A number of works have been devoted to the Samoan languages ​​(especially Seljuin), which he learned as a self-taught man, and which he regularly included in his lectures. He was primarily interested in the historical-evolutionary aspect of language research; The etymology was called "royal discipline" (Königsdisziplin), but it also did not reject synchronism and recent research (see, for example, his Ph.D.

The death of Hartmut Katz at the age of 53 was a great surprise and deeply touched on the community of linguists. This stout, bearded man (Eugene Helimski, close friend of Katz, wrote about him in a memoir: a bearded giant, resembling a geologist or a lumberjack from the Siberian taiga much more than a German professor), reluctant to do all field research and sincerely attached To his desk, he seemed to be a specimen of health (only in the last months of his life he could see his illness). Most important book publications Bibliography

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