ACTA LINGUISTICA LITHUANICA

XLIX (2003), 173–176

IN MEMORIAM

Adolf Erhart

31 May 1926 – 11 August 2003

In the summer, we received the sad news of Adolf Erhart’s death. The linguistic community has lost one of its leading members in Erhart. Baltists, too, mourn Adolf Erhart, for an important part of his scholarly work was devoted to Baltic studies.

From 1945, Adolf Erhart studied German studies, Classical Philology, and Indo-European studies at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University in Brno. In 1949, he completed his studies with a paper on the comparative in the Indo-European languages. In 1959, his dissertation on the origin and development of conjugation in the Indo-European languages was accepted. In 1963, he qualified as a lecturer in comparative Indo-European linguistics with a paper on new perspectives on Indo-European consonantism. Owing to unfavorable external circumstances, Adolf Erhart was not appointed professor until 1988, although the relevant procedure had already begun in 1968. From 1993, Erhart was professor emeritus.

Erhart’s main research interest was the origin and development of Indo-European inflection. The first compilation of his individual studies appeared under the title Studies in Indo-European Morphology (1970), followed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by two monographs: The Indo-European Verbal System (1989) and Indo-European Nominal Inflection and Its Genesis (1993).

Associated with Erhart’s Indo-European research were his contributions to various individual Indo-European philologies. Erhart was the author of a descriptive and historical grammar of Sanskrit and a comparative grammar

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IN MEMORIAM

of the Indo-Iranian languages. Erhart’s numerous contributions to Slavic studies are significant; they appeared in various journals. However, perhaps Erhart’s favorite research area within Indo-European studies was Baltic studies. As early as 1956, Erhart wrote a short Lithuanian grammar and also translated several Lithuanian tales. In 1984, his comparative grammar of the Baltic languages was published (Erhart, unfortunately, did not live to see its new edition, which is currently in preparation). Erhart also wrote a series of papers on particular questions in Baltic linguistics, especially from an Indo-European and comparative perspective; these were always inspiring. One need only recall, for example, his solution to the problem of Baltic-Slavic linguistic unity (1958), characterized by Erhart’s typical sense of the (so often neglected) simplicity of linguistic descriptions, or his subtle distinction between the archaic and conservative character of languages (1995). Algirdas Sabaliauskas summarized Erhart’s contribution to Baltic studies in the Lietuvių kalbos enciklopedija (ed. by K. Morkūnas, Vilnius 1999, pp. 181–182).

Thus, like every true Indo-Europeanist, Erhart was also a Baltist. He was a Baltist not only by virtue of his training, but also, and above all, because of his genuine interest in everything Baltic. I will never forget the conversation with Erhart after I returned from my first trip to Lithuania in the summer of 1999. Anyone who knew Erhart knows how reserved he was in personal contact and how gradually he opened up to others. At that time, I too was not yet very close to Erhart. After my trip to Lithuania, however, everything was different: Erhart came to my office himself and asked what I had visited in Lithuania, what I had seen, what was new there. And we had an unusually long, half-hour conversation…

Bohumil Vykypěl

BALTIC BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ADOLF ERHART¹

1956

Litevština. Praha: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství, 1956. (Rez.: M. Vey, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 53, 1957–58, 2, 190)

Lithuanian Stories. Edited by P. Trost. Prague: Svět sovětů, 1956 (co-translator).

Lithuanian Dictionaries. Proceedings of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Brno A 4, 1956, 142–143.

1957

The Balto-Slavic word for “North”. Proceedings of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Brno A 5, 1957, 5–7.

¹ For the complete bibliography of Adolf Erhart and the literature about Erhart, see Grammaticus. Studia linguistica Adolfo Erharto quinque et septuagenario oblata. Edited by O. Šefčík and B. Vykypěl. Brno 2001, 14–23, and the supplements in Proceedings of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Brno A 52, 2004.