Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck

Uhlenbeck, Christianus Cornelius 

Born Sept. 18, 1866, in Voorburg, the Netherlands; died Aug. 12,1951, in Lugano, Switzerland. Dutch linguist.

Uhlenbeck graduated from the University of Leiden in 1888. In 1892 he was named to the chair of Sanskrit and comparative philology at the University of Amsterdam, and from 1899 to 1926 he held the chair of Germanic languages at the University of Leiden. Uhlenbeck specialized in Indo-European, Basque, and American Indian languages and devoted his attention to the problem of the genetic relationship between the Eskimo-Aleut languages and Indo-European and other Old World languages; he also studied the genetic relationships of the Basque language.

Uhlenbeck compiled Old Indie and Gothic etymological dictionaries. He advanced hypotheses on the “hybridization” of the Indo-European grammatical structure and on the presence of an ergative construction in Proto-Indo-European. Uhlenbeck was a member of several academies and scholarly societies.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Ergativnaia konstruktsiiapredlozheniia. Moscow, 1950.

REFERENCE

De Josselin de Jong, J. P. B. “In memoriam Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck.” Lingua, 1953, vol. 3, no. 3. (Contains bibliography.)

M. E. ALEKSEEV