Henry M. Hoenigswald


Henry Max Hoenigswald was a German scholar of linguistics, who in 1939 escaped to the United States where he had a long and productive academic career as a scholar of historical linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Biography

Hoenigswald was born Heinrich Max Franz Hönigswald in Breslau, Germany. He was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He married Gabriele Schoepflich in 1944,
He was educated in the German Gymnasium, where he learned the classical languages, and trained as an Indo-Europeanist and a historical and comparative linguist in universities in Munich, Zurich, Padua, and Florence. His refugee status compelled these moves. In 1939 he escaped to the United States, where he was at first a research assistant at Yale. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1948 until his retirement in 1985. He was a member of the Linguistic Society of America, of which he was elected President in 1958, and a member of the American Philosophical Society for more than 30 years. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He spent a year at Oxford in 1976 and was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1986.
His arrival in the United States meant not only an end of political oppression but also working contact with scholars who were establishing linguistics as a science, notably Zellig Harris. Deeply familiar with the solid work done by historical linguists, but skeptical by nature, he rapidly came to question their stated rationale and justification for these results, "the gap between substantive practice and theoretical preachment". His work included on the one hand specific penetrating studies in Indo-European and Classical linguistics, and on the other fundamental work in the theory of historical linguistics, some of the first and most lastingly important attempts at formalization of the techniques of historical comparison and reconstruction.
His major work Language change and linguistic reconstruction recapitulates and epitomizes his thinking and his way of working. It exemplifies well several cardinal features of all his work: his conciseness of expression, his formal methods, his recognition that changes, whether in phonology, morphology, or semantics, are changes in the distribution of elements relative to one another, including nil as an element, and his conviction that it is not proper to present historical materials "downward, as history" but rather "upward in time, as inference".
Personally, he was deeply committed to liberal causes, and strongly averse to cant and rhetoric of any kind. His generosity to deserving students "was rewarded with feelings of intellectual admiration and personal warmth toward him" that persist.
Hoenigswald died in Haverford, Pennsylvania at the age of 88.

Books