Kurylowicz, Jerzy

Kurylowicz, Jerzy

(born Aug. 26, 1895, Stanislav, Galicia, Austria-Hungary—died Jan. 28, 1978, Kraków, Pol.) Polish historical linguist. His identification of the Hittite medial h in 1927 substantiated the existence of laryngeals, the Indo-European speech sounds postulated by Ferdinand de Saussure, and stimulated much research in Indo-European phonology. His books include Apophony in Indo-European (1956) and The Inflectional Categories of Indo-European (1964).

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Kurylowicz, Jerzy 

Born Aug. 26,1895, in Stanisławów. Polish linguist. Specialist in Indo-European, Semitic, and general linguistics. Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (1931).

Kuryłowicz studied in Lvov, Vienna, and Paris (with A. Meillet). He was a professor at the Universities of Lvov (1929–45) and Wroclaw (1946–48) and at the Jagellonian University in Kraków (from 1948). One of the founders of modern structural linguistics, Kuryłowicz wrote works on the phonetics and morphology of the Indo-European languages, on ablaut in the Semitic and Indo-European languages, and on general linguistics. He studied the chronology of the development of morphological systems in the modern Indo-European languages. He is an honorary member of a number of foreign academies of sciences and has received the degree of doctor of philosophy honoris causa from the Sorbonne (1957) and the University of Dublin (1959). He was awarded the State Prize of the Polish People’s Republic in 1955 and 1964.

WORKS

Études indoeuropéennes. Kraków, 1935.
L’Accentuation des langues indoeuropéennes. Kraków, 1952.
L’Apophonie en indoeuropéen. Wrocław, 1956.
Esquisses linguistiques. Wrocław-Kraków, 1960.
L’Apophonie en sémitique. Wrocław-Warszaw-Kraków, 1961.
The Inflectional Categories of Indo-European. Heidelberg, 1964.
In Russian translation:
Ocherki po lingyistike. Moscow, 1962.

REFERENCE

Safarewicz, J. “Jerzy Kuryłowicz.” Nauka Polska, 1956, vol. 4, no. 4 (16).