Gabriel Altmann (1931–2020)

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Gabriel Altmann on 2 March 2020 in Lüdenscheid, Germany. During the last weeks of his life he suffered from an illness from which he could not recover. He left our community and the world after an outstandingly productive professional life as a linguist and mathematician.

Gabriel Altmann was born on 24 May 1931 in the Slovak village of Poltár, where his father worked as a general practitioner. After primary school he attended the grammar school in Lučenec and passed his final examinations in 1951. In those times of ‘real socialism’ it was not always easy to attain one’s professional aims for people from an academic family, but Gabriel succeeded and got the opportunity to study Indonesian linguistics and Japanese philology at the Charles University in Prague from 1953 to 1958. Here he also came into contact with Vladimír Skalička, a well-known general linguist and typologist who certainly influenced his approach to linguistics. After gaining his PhD in 1964 Gabriel received the state doctorate at the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences with his habilitation ‘Kvantitatívne štúdie indonezistiky’ (Quantitative Studies in Indonesian Philology). A survey of his publications written in the 1960s allows us to reconstruct his fundamental scientific interests, which were the quantitative analysis of languages and texts with a particular focus on phonetic/phonological issues, and quantitative studies of poetry and rhyme structures. In the years from 1960 to 1968 he worked at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Slovakian Academy of Sciences (Ústav orientalistiky SAV) in Bratislava (former Czechoslovakia, now Slovakia).

A grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enabled him to visit the Institute of Phonetics at the University of Cologne from 1968 to 1969, exactly at the time of the Prague Spring, which ended with the invasion by Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops and radically interrupted all processes of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia. Gabriel decided to start a new life with his family in the Western world, and¹ in 1970 he accepted the position of researcher in the project ‘Automatic syntax analysis of German’ at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Then, again supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he was appointed visiting professor for quantitative linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the Ruhr University in Bochum. In 1971 he received his German venia legendi, based on his habilitation dissertation Introduction to Quantitative Phonology. Thereafter he worked as full professor of mathematical linguistics until his retirement in 1996.

In his early Bochum days Gabriel initiated his life’s enterprise, which was to create a new scientific discipline, quantitative linguistics. Before that, quantitative methods were used in linguistics rather sporadically and more or less unsystematically. One can easily understand that a chosen path is not always easy, and Gabriel encountered various problems. More often than not, colleagues and students at that time had rather sparse mathematical backgrounds, and Gabriel’s linguistic and methodological thinking was foreign to most contemporary German linguists. The demands he imposed on scientific methodology was (and largely remains) unfamiliar and unusual in humanities disciplines; only those of his students seriously interested in his ideas and concepts, and who were ready to invest years of additional hard and concentrated work, had any chance of following him. Nevertheless, as we know today, Gabriel succeeded in gathering a circle of devoted students and scholars, first in Bochum, and later in many other countries. His personal charisma and academic reputation steadily grew. This was also due to the fact that Gabriel was a sought-after, effective and at the same time humanly warm advisor and supporter outside the academic context. From this initial role of intellectual mentor, Gabriel often became to many colleagues a lifelong friend (‘Gabi’).

In 1978, after years of preparation, Gabriel founded the Quantitative Linguistics book series with two subseries, Glottometrika and Musikometrika; he was not only a brilliant linguist and mathematician, but also a gifted musician. Within the first ten years, thirty volumes by authors from all five continents appeared under his direction in this series, which continued in almost unchanged form until volume 60. The series was first published by Brockmeyer in Bochum, then by the Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, and since 2007 by de Gruyter, Berlin. His Festschrift on the occasion of his 75th birthday appeared as issue no. 62 of Quantitative Linguistics, for which Gabriel was also co-editor until his death.

Gabriel’s students became researchers and professors and, together with an increasing number of colleagues, constituted an international and interdisciplinary scientific network. The discipline of quantitative linguistics became increasingly established, and in 1993 the international Journal of Quantitative Linguistics was founded, again with Gabriel as a spiritus movens. In 1994 The International Quantitative Linguistics Association was founded, of which he was the Honorary President from 2005 onwards. In 1995 the comprehensive Bibliography of Quantitative Linguistics was published (cf. Köhler, 1995), which would not have been possible without Gabriel’s’s help. In 2001, finally, he started another quantitative linguistics journal, Glottometrics, which he edited until his death. He is also the founding editor of the Studies in Quantitative Linguistics book series, published by RAM-Verlag, a publishing house established together with his wife Jutta Richter, in which a further 30 issues have been published since 2008. In that year he helped with and supported the establishment of the journal Glottotheory, whose founding editor was Gabriel’s Slovak colleague Emíla Nemcová, and which was primarily intended as an interdisciplinary forum for quantitative and qualitative approaches in linguistics and text analysis; it was initially published by the University of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Trnava before moving to Akademie-Verlag and finally to de Gruyter in Berlin.

Gabriel launched and managed numerous national and international research projects as well as personally establishing contacts with research groups from all over the world such as, from the late 1970s, the group Statistika reči in the former Soviet Union (led by R.G. Piotrovskij), and with many other groups in Europe, Japan, China and Canada. One can therefore conclude that Gabriel is not only the founder of quantitative linguistics in Germany, but also the Nestor of modern quantitative linguistics in general. In 2005 the handbook Quantitative Linguistics was published by de Gruyter in Berlin; it was edited by Reinhard Köhler, R.G. Piotrovskij and Gabriel himself. This handbook gives a comprehensive overview of quantitative linguistics and related linguistic and philological disciplines.

From the beginning, Gabriel’s scientific work aimed to conduct research on the basis of sound methodology in line with the philosophy of science as well as to overcome the purely descriptive phase in quantitative linguistics in order to pave the way for the next step: to lay the foundations of fundamental scientific terms such as ‘theory’, ‘law’, ‘hypothesis’ and ‘explanation’ within a linguistic framework, these concepts having become blurred and misused over preceding decades. The construction of a linguistic theory – in the strict sense of the philosophy of science – as the ultimate aim of the study of text and language has been Gabriel’s primary issue.

His impressive methodological creativity can partly be explained by the fact that he was also an active research mathematician and statistician, though in personal communication he refused to describe himself either as a linguist or as a mathematician. His deep mathematical and statistical background is evident from his numerous publications in mathematical journals. One of his major mathematical projects is the comprehensive Thesaurus of Univariate Discrete Probability Distributions, published with Gejza Wimmer, which contains descriptions of some 750 discrete distribution families (cf. Wimmer & Altmann, 1999). Quite a few of these distributions were derived by Gabriel himself. Directly related to this engagement with probability distributions is the development of a software package, the Altmann-Fitter, for the iterative fitting of approximately 200 discrete probability distributions to empirical data, including parameter estimation and goodness-of-fit tests. This package is in use by dozens of researchers in several disciplines and is certainly responsible for a modelling boom in quantitative linguistics, since it allows users to quickly and effectively find proper statistical models for linguistic frequency data. Gabriel was perfectly aware of the specificity of linguistic data and the problems of blindly applying statistical methods taken mostly from natural and social sciences. These ‘classical’ methods, based on the law of large numbers and the validity of the normal distribution, are of course commonly accepted, but they are not always suitable for linguistic problems, as Gabriel noted in his most prominent programmatic papers (Altmann, 1972, 1973, 1978, 1985a, 1987, 1987, 1990, 1993, 1996, 1997, 2006; Altmann & Lehfeldt, 1973; Köhler & Altmann, 1996, 2005). Gabriel developed new statistical methods for specifically linguistic purposes, and in fact he devoted more time to this issue than to any other.

Gabriel Altmann was not only a pioneer but also the leading ‘global player’ in the field of quantitative linguistics. It is hardly possible to name one specific focus of his wide scientific horizon. Without any doubt it is a broad field of scientific interest and philosophical concerns: from phonetics and phonology to grammar and semantics, including typology, geolinguistics and dialectology, text analysis, lexicology and so on. Or, as he has classified his collected works (for the time being unpublished) in four volumes (1961–1999), as Vol. 1 General: Symmetry, Systems, Synergetics, Vol. 2 Phonology, Grammar, Structure of Units, Vol. 3 Semantics, Lexicon, Dialectology, Historical Linguistic, Areal Linguistics and Vol. 4 Typology, Text Analysis, Probability Distributions.

Gabriel was an impressively all-round creative and productive person. In addition to the work already described, he was also a translator, as can be seen in the book Problems of Quantitative-Systemic Lexicology by Juhan Tuldava (Tuldava, 1998), which he translated from Russian into German and published in 1998 as volume 59 of the series Quantitative Linguistics. More than a translator, however, he was a master of transfer via his numerous international contacts by encouraging people from different academic backgrounds and cultures to share their knowledge by publishing their results in languages understandable by a larger community. Moreover, he motivated younger colleagues by advising them to ‘go their own way’. Here one has to refer to selected volumes of the book series Studies in Quantitative Linguistics, where Gabriel and his colleagues published six booklets named Problems of Quantitative Linguistics (cf. Altmann, 2015; Čech & Altmann, 2011; Kelih & Altmann, 2018; Köhler & Altmann, 2009, 2014; Strauß et al., 2008). All these booklets contain selected problems of quantitative linguistics in the form of a research hypothesis, including the broader background of the hypothesis and related references. Thus, the researcher gets all the required ‘ingredients’ for an empirical analysis. Gabriel was a truly open-minded person, always ready to share his ideas and projects without any academic vanity.

To his closer friends, Gabriel is known not only as a scientific genius but also as the author of a huge collection of humorous short stories, which are proof of his sparkling humour. We could continue this description with many further examples of his manifold abilities, but we should not forget his outstanding personal characteristics. Everyone who knew him by personal contact, either directly or via online collaboration, has experienced his exceptional, unselfish helpfulness.

This is now the moment to thank him most cordially in the name of the many students, colleagues, and friends whom he supported with advice and practical help, with patience and good humour, with encouragement and direct engagement.

In May 2020 his ashes were scattered in the Danube, his most beloved river.

May he rest in peace.

Notes

1. The following paragraphs are taken from the bibliographical sketch written by Peter Grzybek and Reinhard Köhler, which is published in the Festschrift dedicated to Gabriel Altmann on the occasion of his 75^th birthday, where over 60 colleagues from all over the world contributed (Grzybek & Köhler, 2007). Where necessary the original sketch is modified stylistically. In the second part of the obituary some more information about Gabriel Altmann’s scientific engagements is given. Altmann’s first Festschrift Viribus unitis was published in 1991 on the occasion of his 60^th birthday (cf. Grotjahn et al., 1991).