Henry Max Hoenigswald was born 17 April 1915 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw

Wroclaw

Wrocław , situated on the River Oder , is the main city of southwestern Poland.Wrocław was the historical capital of Silesia and is today the capital of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship. Over the centuries, the city has been part of either Poland, Bohemia, Austria, Prussia, or Germany, but since 1945...

, Poland); Professor of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania

University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...

 1948-85 (Emeritus); married 1944 Gabriele Schoepflich (died 2001; two daughters); died Haverford, Pennsylvania 16 June 2003.

He was educated in the German Gymnasium, where he learned the classical languages, and trained as an Indo-Europeanist

Indo-European studies

Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European , and its speakers, the...

 and a historical and comparative linguist

Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...

 in universities in Munich, Zurich, Padua, and Florence. His refugee

Refugee

A refugee is a person who outside her country of origin or habitual residence because she has suffered persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or because she is a member of a persecuted 'social group'. Such a person may be referred to as an 'asylum seeker' until...

 status compelled these moves (his grandparents were Jewish, and by 1933 Jews were forbidden to attend German universities). In 1939 he escaped to the United States, where he was at first a research assistant at Yale

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania

University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...

 from 1948 until his retirement in 1985. He was a member of the Linguistic Society of America

Linguistic Society of America

The Linguistic Society of America is a professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1924 to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The LSA has over 5,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. It works to advance the discipline and to communicate...

, of which he was elected President in 1958, and a member of the American Philosophical Society

American Philosophical Society

The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, and located in Philadelphia, Pa., is an eminent scholarly organization of international reputation, that promotes useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications,...

 for more than 30 years. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences

United States National Academy of Sciences

The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...

. He spent a year at Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

 in 1976 and was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy

British Academy

The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national body for the humanities and the social sciences. Its purpose is to inspire, recognise and support excellence in the humanities and social sciences, throughout the UK and internationally, and to champion their role and value.It receives an annual...

 in 1986.

His arrival in the United States meant not only an end of political oppression but also working contact with scholars who were establishing linguistics as a science, notably Zellig Harris

Zellig Harris

Zellig Sabbettai Harris was a renowned American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language...

. Deeply familiar with the solid work done by historical linguists, but skeptical by nature, he rapidly came to question their stated rationale and justification for these results, "the gap between substantive practice and theoretical preachment". His work included on the one hand specific penetrating studies in Indo-European and Classical linguistics, and on the other fundamental work in the theory of historical linguistics, some of the first and most lastingly important attempts at formalization of the techniques of historical comparison and reconstruction.

His major work Language change and linguistic reconstruction (Hoenigswald 1960) recapitulates and epitomizes his thinking and his way of working. It exemplifies well several cardinal features of all his work: his conciseness of expression, his formal methods, his recognition that changes, whether in phonology, morphology, or semantics, are changes in the distribution of elements relative to one another, including nil as an element, and his conviction that it is not proper to present historical materials "downward, as history" but rather "upward in time, as inference".

Personally, he was deeply committed to liberal causes, and strongly averse to cant and rhetoric of any kind. His generosity to deserving students "was rewarded with feelings
of intellectual admiration and personal warmth toward him" that persist.

Selected writings

There is a complete bibliography at http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/links/hmh_bib.html.

• 1937. Su alcuni caratteri della derivazione e della composizione nominale indoeuropea. Rendiconti Istituto Lombardo Lettere n.s. 1:267-274.
• 1938. Problemi di linguistica umbra—a proposito delle Tabulae Iguvinae editae a Iacobo Devoto. Rivista di Filologia Classica 16:274-294.
• 1939. Studi sulla punteggiatura nei testi etruschi. Studi Etruschi 12:169-217.
• 1940. Παν-compounds in early Greek. Language 16:183-187.
• 1945. Spoken Hindustani, Basic Course. 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt.
• 1946. Etruscan. In Encyclopedia of Literature, vol. I, ed. J. T. Shipley, pp. 278-279. New York: Philosophical Library.
• 1952. The phonology of dialect borrowing. Stud. Linguist. 10:1-5.
• 1953. I fondamenti della storia linguistica e le posizioni neogrammatiche. Lingua Nostra 12:47-50.
• 1954. Linguistics in the sixteenth century. Libr. Chron. 20:1-4.
• 1955. Change, analogic and semantic. Indian Linguist. 16:233-236.
• 1958. A Latin trace of the construction dātā rādhāṃsi. Indian Linguist. 19-20:232-234.
• 1960. Language change and linguistic reconstruction. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
• 1962a. Bilingualism, presumed bilingualism, and diachrony. Anthropol. Linguist. 4:1-5.
• 1962b. Lexicography and grammar. In Problems in Lexicography, ed. F. W. Housholder, pp. 103-110. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• 1963. On the history of the comparative method. Anthropol. Linguist. 5:1-11.
• 1964a. Mycenaean augments and the language of poetry. In Mycenaean Studies: Proceedings of the 3rd International Colloquium for My cenaean Studies, ed. E. L. Bennett Jr., pp. 179-182. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
• 1964b. Graduality, sporadicity, and the minor sound change processes. Phonetica 11:202-215.
• 1965a. Indo-Iranian evidence. In Evidence for Laryngeals, ed. W. Winter, pp. 93-99. The Hague: Mouton.
• 1965b. Review: John Lyons, Structural Semantics: An Analysis of Part of the Vocabulary of Plato. Journal of Linguistics, 1:191-196, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• 1966. Criteria for the subgrouping of languages. In Ancient Indo-European Dialects, ed. H. Birnbaum and J. Puhvel, pp. 1-12. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• 1968. A note on overlength in Greek. Word 24:252-254. The syllabaries and Etruscan writing. Incunabula Graeca 25:410-416.
• 1970. With G. Cardona and A. Senn, eds. Indo-European and Indo Europeans. Haney Foundation Series 9. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• 1973a. Relative chronology—notes on so-called intermediate stages. In Proceedings of the XIth International Congress of Linguists, vol. I, ed. L. Heilmann, pp. 369-373. Bologna: Il Mulino.
• 1973b. Linguistics. In Dictionary of the history of ideas: studies of selected pivotal ideas, Vol. III. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 61-73.
• 1974. Internal reconstruction and context. In Historical Linguistics: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Historical Linguistics, vol. II, eds. J. M. Anderson and C. Jones, pp. 189-201. Amsterdam: North Holland.
• 1977a. Diminutives and tatpuruṣas: The Indo-European trend toward endocentricity. J. Indo-Eur. Stud. 5:9-13.
• 1977b. Intentions, assumptions, and contradictions in historical linguistics. In Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, ed. R. W. Cole, pp. 168-193. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• 1978a. Adjectives as first compound members in Homer. In Linguistic and Literary Studies in Honor of A. A. Hill, vol. III, Historical and Comparative Linguistics, eds. M. A. Jayazeri, E. C. Polome, and W. Winter, pp. 91-95. The Hague: Mouton.
• 1978b. Secondary split, typology, and universals. In Recent Developments in Historical Phonology, ed. J. Fisiak, pp. 173-182. The Hague: Mouton.
• 1979. Ed. The European Background of American Linguistics. Lisse: Foris.
• 1980a. A reconstruction. In Davis, B. H., and R. O’Cain, eds. First Person Singular: Papers from the Conference on an Oral Archive for the History of American Linguistics, Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science III: Studies in the History of Linguistics, vol. 21. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 21-28.
• 1980b. Notes on reconstruction, word order, and stress. In Linguistic Reconstruction and Indo-European Syntax, ed. P. Ramat, pp. 69-87. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• 1981. Degrees of genetic relatedness among languages. In Suniti Kuman Chatterji Commemoration Volume, ed. S. Mallik, pp. 113-115. Burdwan: University of Burdwan.
• 1984. Etymology against grammar in the early 19th century. Histoire, epistemologie, language 6(2):95-100.
• 1985a. Distinzioni reali e distinzioni chimeriche nella classificazione dei cambiamenti fonologici. In Societa Linguistica Italiana: XVI0 Congresso Internazionale di Studi, ed. L. Agostiniani et al., pp. 111-118. Roma: Bulzoni.
• 1985b. Sir William Jones and historiography. In For Gordon H. Fairbanks, ed. V. Z. Abson and R. L. Leed, pp. 64-66. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
• 1986a. Nineteenth-century linguistics on itself. In Studies in the History of Western Linguistics in Honour of R. H. Robins, eds. T. Bynon and F. R. Palmer, pp. 172-188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• 1986b. Some properties of analogic innovations. In Linguistics Across Historical and Geographic Boundaries, vol. 1, eds. D. Kastovsky and A. Szwedek, pp. 357-370. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• 1987a. Bloomfield and historical linguistics. Hist. Ling. 14:73-88.
• 1987b. Language family trees, topological and metrical. In Biological Metaphor and Cladistic Classification: An interdisciplinary perspective, eds. H. M. Hoenigswald and L. F. Wiener, pp. 257-267. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• 1989a. Language obsolescence and language history: Matters of linearity, leveling, loss, and the like. In Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death, ed. N. C. Dorian, pp. 347-354. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• 1989b. Overlong syllables in Rgvedic cadences. J. Am. Orient. Soc. 109:559-563.
• 1990. Does language grow on trees? Ancestry, descent, regularity. Proc. Am. Philos. Soc. 134(1):10-18.
• 1992. Comparative method, internal reconstruction, typology. In Reconstructing Language and Culture, eds. E. C. Polome and W. Winter, pp. 23-34. Trends in Linguistics 58. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• 1993. Greco. In Le Lingue Indoeuropée, eds. A. G. Ramat and P. Ramat, pp. 255-288. Bologna: Il Mulino.
• 1998. Greek. In The Indo-European Languages, eds. A. G. Ramat and P. Ramat, pp. 228-260. London: Routledge. (English version of [1993]).
• 2000. Historical-comparative grammar. In Morphology: An International Handbook on Inflection and Word Formation, vol. 1, eds. G. Booij, C. Lehmann, and J. Mugdan in collaboration with W. Kesselheim and S. Skopetas, pp. 117-124. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• 2004. Indo-European. In Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, ed. R. G. Woodard, pp. 534-550. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.