Georgios Nicolaou Hatzidakis, aka Georgios Nikolaou Chatzidakis (; , in Myrthios,

Ottoman Crete The island of Crete () was declared an Ottoman province (eyalet) in 1646, after the Ottomans managed to conquer the western part of the island as part of the Cretan War (1645–1669), Cretan War, but the Republic of Venice, Venetians Siege of Can ...

– 28 June 1941, in

Athens Athens ( ) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Greece, largest city of Greece. A significant coastal urban area in the Mediterranean, Athens is also the capital of the Attica (region), Attica region and is the southe ...

) was a

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

philologist Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also defined as the study of ...

, who is regarded as the father of

linguistics 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 ...

in Greece. He was the first chair of Linguistics and Indian Philology at the

University of Athens The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA; , ''Ethnikó kai Kapodistriakó Panepistímio Athinón''), usually referred to simply as the University of Athens (UoA), is a public university in Athens, Greece, with various campuses alo ...

in 1890–1923.

Life and work

His family was traditionally part of the Cretan revolts against the

Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire (), also called the Turkish Empire, was an empire, imperial realm that controlled much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 14th to early 20th centuries; it also controlled parts of southeastern Centr ...

. His grandfather Kyriakos had taken part as a captain in the uprising of 1821. After his schooling at Rethymno, Georgios at the age of 18 fought himself by the side of his father in the uprising of 1866. After a three-year school visit in Athens, Chatzidakis was enrolled at the faculty of philosophy of the

for classical philology. In 1877, he won in a university competition a scholarship for linguistics study in Germany, which he pursued afterwards at the

University of Leipzig Leipzig University (), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 December 1409 by Frederick I, Electo ...

with Georg Curtius and Karl Brugmann. Since then, Chatzidakis remained in contact with German researchers, as for example the more than 15 years his junior Albert Thumb ( de) whose obituary he later wrote. After his return to Greece, Chatzidakis was first a grammar school teacher in Athens and was conferred a doctorate the next year with a thesis entitled ''Συμβολή εις την Ιστορίαν της Ελληνικής Γλώσσης'' ("Contribution to the History of the Greek Language") at the university there.

Sources

CV at UoA.gr
1843 births 1941 deaths People from Rethymno (regional unit) Academic staff of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Emigrants from the Ottoman Empire to Greece Members of the Academy of Athens (modern) Greek philologists Grand Commanders of the Order of the Phoenix (Greece) Linguists from Greece Members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences 19th-century Greek people 20th-century Greek people {{greece-bio-stub