Tadeusz Lehr-Splawinski

Born Sept. 20, 1891, in Kraków; died there, Feb. 17, 1965. Polish Slavic scholar. Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences from 1952; corresponding member from 1928.

Lehr-Spławiński graduated from the Jagellonian University in Kraków in 1913. He subsequently taught at the University of Poznan (1919–21), the Jan Kazimierz University in L’vov (1922–29), and the Jagellonian University (1929–62). In 1939 he was confined for several months in the fascist concentration camp of Saxenhausen. After the liberation of Krakow in 1945, he became director of the Institute of Linguistics and head of the subdepartment of Slavic philology at the Jagellonian University. He edited the journal Rocznik slawistyczny. His principal research dealt with the Slavic, Baltic, and Celtic languages, the ethnogenesis and original homeland of the Slavs, Proto-Slavic, Polish dialectology and lexicology, and Slavic accentuation and onomastics. He also wrote textbooks on Church Slavonic, Polish, Czech, and Russian.