Carl Meinhof

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Carl Meinhof
Born23 July 1857
Barzwitz, Province of Pomerania (now Barzowice, Poland)
Died
11 February 1944(1944-02-11) (aged 86)
NationalityGerman
OccupationLinguist

Carl Friedrich Michael Meinhof (23 July 1857 – 11 February 1944) was a German

African languages
.

Early years and career

Meinhof was born in Barzwitz near Rügenwalde in the Province of Pomerania, Kingdom of Prussia. He studied at the University of Tübingen[citation needed] and at the University of Greifswald.[1] In 1905 he became professor at the School of Oriental Studies in Berlin. On 5 May 1933 he became a member of the Nazi Party.

Works

His most notable work was developing comparative

Wilhelm Bleek. In his work, Meinhof looked at the common Bantu languages such as Swahili and Zulu
to determine similarities and differences.

In his work, Meinhof looked at

Ganda
has 16 or 17 (depending on whether the locative class 23 e- is included). All Bantu languages have a noun class specifically for humans (sometimes including other animate beings).

Meinhof also examined other African languages, including groups classified at the time as

Hamitic
.

Meinhof developed a comprehensive classification scheme for African languages. His classification was the standard one for many years (Greenberg 1955:3). It was replaced by those of Joseph Greenberg in 1955 and in 1963.

In 1902, Meinhof made recordings of East African music. These are among the first recordings made of traditional

African music
.

Controversial views

In 1912, Carl Meinhof published Die Sprachen der Hamiten (The Languages of the Hamites). He used the term

Nilo-Hamitic languages (a concept he introduced), it was based on the typological feature of gender and a "fallacious theory of language mixture." Meinhof did this in spite of earlier work by scholars such as Lepsius and Johnston demonstrating that the languages which he would later dub "Nilo-Hamitic" were in fact Nilotic languages with numerous similarities in vocabulary with other Nilotic languages.[3]

Family

Carl Meinhof was the great-uncle (the brother of the grandfather) of

left-wing militant group, which operated in West Germany
in the 1970s and 1980s.

See also

References

  1. ISSN 1535-0665
    .
  2. ^ Kevin Shillington, Encyclopedia of African History, CRC Press, 2005, p.797
  3. ^ Merritt Ruhlen, A Guide to the World's Languages, (Stanford University Press: 1991), p.109
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. 1955. Studies in African Linguistic Classification. New Haven: Compass Publishing Company.
  • Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. The Languages of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  • Meinhof, Carl. 1906. Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen. Berlin: Reimer.
  • Pugach, Sara. 2004. "Images of race and redemption: The Protestant missionary contribution to Carl Meinhof's Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen", Le Fait Missionaire: Social Sciences and Missions 15 (December 2004), 59–96.

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carl_Meinhof&oldid=1199751171"