Georg von der Gabelentz

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz (1840 - 1893) was a German philologist and sinologist, famous for his Chinesische Grammatik published in 1881.

Gabelentz was born in Poschwitz, near Altenburg, Thuringia. His father was the more renowned minister and linguist Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, an authority of the Manchu language. Gabelentz taught himself Dutch, Italian and Chinese during his gymnasium years.

From 1860 to 1864, following his father's steps, he studied law, administration, and linguistics at Jena. In 1864 he entered the civil service of Saxony at Dresden. He continued his study of oriental languages at Leipzig. He married Alexandra von Rothkirch in 1872. His father Hans died at the family castle of Lemnitz in 1874.

Gabelentz earned his doctoral from Dresden in 1876 with a translation of Chou Tun-Yi's Taiji Tushuo (太極圖說 "Explaining taiji"). In 1878, a Professorship of Far Eastern Languages, the first of its kind in the German-speaking world, was created at the University of Leipzig, and Gabelentz was invited to fill it. In 1889, he divorced, and switched to the University of Berlin. In 1891, he remarried, and published Die Sprachwissenschaft ("Linguistics"). His Handbuch zur Aufnahme fremder Sprachen followed one year later.

[edit] References

  • Biography in German
  • Biography in English
  • David B. Honey, Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology, New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2001, p.124


In other languages