Jan Czekanowski (October 8, 1882, Głuchów – July 20, 1965,

Szczecin Szczecin (, , german: Stettin ; sv, Stettin ; Latin: ''Sedinum'' or ''Stetinum'') is the capital and largest city of the West Pomeranian Voivodeship in northwestern Poland. Located near the Baltic Sea and the German border, it is a major s ...

) was a Polish

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms an ...

statistician A statistician is a person who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, and statisticians may w ...

ethnographer Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject o ...

travel Travel is the movement of people between distant geographical locations. Travel can be done by foot, bicycle, automobile, train, boat, bus, airplane, ship or other means, with or without luggage, and can be one way or round trip. Travel c ...

ler, and

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...

. His scientific contributions include introducing his system of racial classification and founding the field of

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...

. Czekanowski is known for having played an important role in saving the Polish-

Lithuania Lithuania (; lt, Lietuva ), officially the Republic of Lithuania ( lt, Lietuvos Respublika, links=no ), is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. Lithuania ...

n branch of the Karaite people from

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...

extermination. In 1942, he managed to convince

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...

"race scientists" that the Karaites were of Turkic origin although professing

Judaism Judaism ( he, ''Yahăḏūṯ'') is an Abrahamic, monotheistic, and ethnic religion comprising the collective religious, cultural, and legal tradition and civilization of the Jewish people. It has its roots as an organized religion in th ...

and using

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

as a liturgical language. This helped the Karaites escape the tragic destiny of other European

Jew Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""T ...

s and the Romas.

Life

Czekanowski attended school in Warsaw but was transferred to Latvia, where he finished his education in 1901. He then entered a university in Zurich in 1902; there, he studied anthropology, mathematics, anatomy, and ethnography as a pupil of Swiss anthropologist Rudolf Martin, author of the popular anthropology textbook ''Lehrbuch der Anthropologie''. In 1907 Czekanowski defended his doctoral dissertation. For his dissertation research he traveled to the Royal Museum in Berlin and to Middle Africa from 1906 to 1907. While in Africa, he led a team into the Congo to collect ethnographic materials. While working on studying the societies of

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

, he developed various statistical methods and contributed to the field of

taxonomy Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...

. The research he made in Africa has since been published in five volumes and sent in 1910, to Saint Petersburg ethnography. He then became a professor at the University of Lviv and

University of Poznań A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, th ...

. While working he introduced an innovative approach to mathematical statistics. He worked in these universities from 1913 to 1945 and in the period 1923-1924 he was a president of Polish Copernicus Society of Naturalists. In addition, he worked at the University of Poznań from 1937-1946, where he researched the dynamics of evolution in human populations. He played numerous scientific roles at the University of Poznań, including vice-chairman of the Polish Social Statistic Company.

Racial classification

Czekanowski classified Europe into four pure races. The four pure races were the Nordic, Mediterranean (Ibero-Insular), Lapponoid and Armenoid. The Lapponoid included the central and eastern Europeans along Europe longitudely as well as the

Sami people Acronyms * SAMI, ''Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange'', a closed-captioning format developed by Microsoft * Saudi Arabian Military Industries, a government-owned defence company * South African Malaria Initiative, a virtual expertise ...

of Northern Europe. Czekanowski classified six subraces in Europe which were mixed types of the pure races. The six mixed racial subraces were: the Northwestern (Nordic and Mediterranean), the Subnordic (Nordic and Lapponoid), Alpine (Nordic and Armenoid), the Littoral (Mediterranean and Armenoid), Sublapponoid (Mediterranean and Lapponoid) and the Dinaric (Lapponoid and Armenoid). The Sublapponoid subrace (also called Pile Dwelling race) lived around the Swiss lakes.Coon, Carleton S. The Races of Europe. Racial Classification within the White Family. August 11, 2006. <.> The Greek letters which symbolise races and types could be capital or lower case.

Linguistics

Czekanowski introduced

numerical taxonomy Numerical taxonomy is a classification system in biological systematics which deals with the grouping by numerical methods of taxonomic units based on their character states. It aims to create a taxonomy using numeric algorithms like cluster ...

into

comparative linguistics Comparative linguistics, or comparative-historical linguistics (formerly comparative philology) is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness. Genetic relatedness ...

, thus founding the discipline of

. He developed (1913) a still much-used index of similarity between two samples. He applied it to

phonemes In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

and

words A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no conse ...

in text

corpora Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics Music * ...

of different languages. It was later introduced in analysis of

ecological Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps wi ...

communities A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, to ...

Books

* ''Forschungen im Nil-Kongo. Zwischengebiet'' (1911–17) * ''Zarys metod statystycznych w zastosowaniu do antropologii'' n outline of statistical methods applied in anthropology Warszawa: Towarzystwo Naukowe Warszawskie (1913) * ''Zarys antropologii Polski'' (1930) * ''Człowiek w czasie i przestrzeni'' (1934) * ''Polska - Słowiańszczyzna. Perspektywy antropologiczne'' (1948) * ''Wstęp do historii Słowian, Poznań 1957'' * ''Człowiek w czasie i przestrzeni (third edition)'' (1967)

External links

Czekanowski's Diagram: a Method of Multidimensional Clustering

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Czekanowski, Jan 1882 births 1965 deaths Burials at Powązki Cemetery Polish anthropologists Linguists from Poland Polish statisticians Members of the Lwów Scientific Society 20th-century anthropologists 20th-century linguists