Edward Stankiewicz (17 November 1920 – 31 January 2013) was the B. E. Bensinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

New Haven, Connecticut New Haven is a city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound. With a population of 135,081 as determined by the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. census, New Haven is List ...

from 1971 until he retired in 1991.

Early life

Stankiewicz was born in Warsaw to a Jewish family in 1920. He survived the

Holocaust The Holocaust (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...

, and immigrated to the United States after being freed from

Buchenwald concentration camp Buchenwald (; 'beech forest') was a German Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Nazi Germany, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within the Altreich (pre-1938 ...

. Stankiewicz developed a love for Italian when he transited through the country after World War II.

Research

Stankiewicz received his PhD from Harvard in 1954. He subsequently taught at Indiana University and the University of Chicago before joining Yale in 1971. Stankiewicz is best known for his research on Slavic accentology and morphophonemics. He wrote on all Slavic languages, but took a particular interest in

South Slavic languages The South Slavic languages are one of three branches of the Slavic languages. There are approximately 30 million speakers, mainly in the Balkans. These are separated geographically from speakers of the other two Slavic branches (West Slavic la ...

and traveled to

Yugoslavia , common_name = Yugoslavia , life_span = 1918–19921941–1945: World War II in Yugoslavia#Axis invasion and dismemberment of Yugoslavia, Axis occupation , p1 = Kingdom of SerbiaSerbia , flag_p ...

in order to conduct field studies.

Select publications

* ''Towards a Phonemic Typology of the Slavic Languages''. 1958. 's-Gravenhage: Mouton. * ''The Common Slavic Prosodic Pattern and Its Evolution in Slovenian''. 1966. The Hague: Mouton. * ''Studies in Slavic Morphonemics and Accentology''. 1976. Ann Arbor MI: Michigan Slavic Publications. * '' Baudouin de Courtenay and the Foundations of Structural Linguistics''. 1976. Lisse: Peter de Ridder. * ''Grammars and Dictionaries of the Slavic Languages from the Middle Ages up to 1850: An Annotated Bibliography''. 1984. Berlin: Mouton. * ''The Slavic Languages Unity in Diversity''. 1986. Berlin: Mouton. * ''The Accentual Patterns of the Slavic Languages''. 1993. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. * ''My War Memoir of a Young Jewish Poet''. 2002. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press.

References

1920 births 2013 deaths Linguists from the United States 20th-century Polish Jews Polish emigrants to the United States Jewish American poets University of Chicago alumni Harvard University alumni Yale University faculty Linguists of Slavic languages Linguists from Poland American poets in Yiddish Buchenwald concentration camp survivors 21st-century American Jews {{US-linguist-stub