Gotthelf Bergsträsser, Date of Birth, Date of Death

    

Gotthelf Bergsträsser

German linguist

Date of Birth: 05-Apr-1886

Date of Death: 16-Aug-1933

Profession: university teacher, linguist

Nationality: Germany

Zodiac Sign: Aries


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About Gotthelf Bergsträsser

  • Gotthelf Bergsträsser (5 April 1886, Oberlosa, Plauen – 16 August 1933, near Berchtesgaden) was a German linguist specializing in Semitic studies, generally considered to be one of the greatest of the twentieth century.
  • Bergsträsser was initially a teacher of classical languages before deciding to approach Semitic.He was a professor at Istanbul University during World War I, when he was an officer in the German army stationed in Turkey.
  • While there, he studied the spoken dialects of Arabic and Aramaic in Syria and Palestine.
  • One of his most well known works is the 29th (and final) edition of Wilhelm Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar (1918–1929), which remained incomplete, containing only phonology and morphology of the verb.
  • Also widely admired was his Introduction to the Semitic Languages (1928, English 1983).
  • These brought him international fame as a scholar.
  • His last position was professor of Semitic languages at the University of Munich. Bergsträsser mostly engaged in the study of Arabic, focusing on the history of the text of the Qur'an.
  • Bergsträsser left many of his planned works unfinished (including the rest of his Hebrew grammar and his grammar of spoken Aramaic), when he disappeared while mountaineering in Bavaria in 1933. He was also a historian of Islamic law as evinced by his Grundzüge des islamischen Rechts (Basics of Islamic Law), which was edited and published post-humously by the famous scholar of Islam, Joseph Schacht (Columbia University).
  • Schacht says that Bergsträsser died on the 16th of August in 1933.
  • He covers topics such as the indigenous history of Islamic law, contractual law, personal law, family law, criminal law, business law, inheritance law, procedural law, etc.Bergsträsser was an outspoken anti-Nazi, and helped to save German Jewish scholars.

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