Witold Mańczak (12 August 1924 – 12 January 2016) was a Polish
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
. He was a member of
Polish Academy of Learning
The Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences or Polish Academy of Learning (, PAU), headquartered in Kraków and founded in 1872, is one of two institutions in contemporary Poland having the nature of an academy of sciences (the other being the Po ...
and the
Polish Academy of Sciences
The Polish Academy of Sciences (, PAN) is a Polish state-sponsored institution of higher learning. Headquartered in Warsaw, it is responsible for spearheading the development of science across the country by a society of distinguished scholars a ...
.
He is best known for his
historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages. Historical li ...
work on identifying, via statistical methods focusing especially on well-studied European languages, overarching tendencies in analogical change.
[Hock, Hans Henrich (1988). ''Principles of Historical Linguistics''. Page 210: "the question whether there are any natural tendencies or directionalities in analogical change... Two Polish scholars, Jerzy Kuryłowicz and Witold Mańczak, have dealt most comprehensively with this change. . Mańczak... based his obeservations on a statistical investigation of the analogical changes postulated in standard handbooks on... various European languages"] He has also argued that
Gothic is closer to German than to Scandinavian, and suggests
Goths
The Goths were a Germanic people who played a major role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the emergence of medieval Europe. They were first reported by Graeco-Roman authors in the 3rd century AD, living north of the Danube in what is ...
originally hailed from somewhere around present day Austria, rather than from Scandinavia."
[Kortlandt, "The origin of the Goths"](_blank)
/ref>
Publications
* Witold Manczak, ''The Method of Comparing the Vocabulary in Parallel Texts''. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 10(2): 93–103 (2003
* Witold Mańczak (1999). Wieża Babel. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich. .
pdf
*Folia Linguistica Historica, Acta Societatis Linguisticae Europaeae . Vol. XXI / 1–2 (200
*WM: Criticism of naturalness: Naturalness or frequency of occurrence?
*WM: Damaris Nübling, Prinzipien der Irregularisierung. Ein kontrastive Analyse von zehn Verben in zehn germanischen Sprachen
*WM: O Odcyfrowaniach pism. BULLETIN DE LA SOCIÉTÉ POLONAISE DE LINGUISTIQUE, fasc. LX, 2004,
*PRAOJCZYZNA SŁOWIA
See also
* Jerzy Kuryłowicz
References
External links
*http://bazy.opi.org.pl/raporty/opisy/osoby/59000/o59610.htm
2016 deaths
Place of birth missing
1924 births
20th-century Polish linguists
21st-century linguists
Academic staff of the Polish Academy of Sciences
Members of the Polish Academy of Learning
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