Horbach, Oleksa

Horbach, Oleksa or Horbatsch, Olexa [Горбач, Олекса; Horbač, Olexa], b 5 February 1918 in Romaniv, Bibrka county, Galicia, d 23 May 1997 in Reichelsheim-Beerfurth, Germany. Linguist and philologist. A graduate of Lviv University, where he studied with Vasyl Simovych, Jan Janów, and Zdzisław Stieber, he lectured at West German universities (1952–65) and became professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Frankfurt (1966–79). He wrote a dissertation and articles on social dialects in Ukrainian (see Jargon), as well as studies on Ukrainian, Church Slavonic, and Polish texts of the 16th–19th centuries, the most important of these being his study of the grammar by Meletii Smotrytsky and the lexicon by Pamva Berynda. He also published descriptions of Ukrainian dialects (especially in Romania, Slovakia, and Yugoslavia) and previously unpublished or inaccessible middle-Ukrainian texts as well as studies in historical lexicology, focusing on problems of etymology. A festschrift in Horbach’s honor was published in 1983. A bio-bibliography, by Yaroslava Zakrevska, appeared in 1995. Horbach’s memoirs came out in 1998 as Shliakh zi skhodu na zakhid (Path from East to West).

[This article was updated in 2005.]