Nitsch, Kazimierz

Nitsch, Kazimierz, b 1 February 1874 in Cracow, d 26 September 1958 in Cracow. Polish linguist. A graduate of Cracow University (PH D, 1898), he was a professor there (1911–17, 1920–39, 1945–52) and at Lviv University (1917–20), and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences from 1911, its president from 1946, and secretary of its philological division in 1924–36. He was also a member of the Bulgarian, Serbian, Slovenian, and USSR academies of sciences, the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, and, from 1937, the Shevchenko Scientific Society. In 1952 he became the vice-president of the Polish Academy of Sciences and chairman of its Linguistics Committee. He was a founding member of the Polish Linguistic Society (1925) and the initiator (1913) and chief editor (1919–58) of Język Polski. At Cracow University he established (in 1924) a Slavic studies center with chairs of Ukrainian language (held by Ivan Zilynsky) and literature (Bohdan Lepky) and was the guardian of the Ukrainian Student Hromada. He laid the foundations of Polish historical dialectology, producing the first studies on the history of Polish dialectal lexicography and the first monographic syntheses of Polish dialects. He wrote over 700 works, including studies of the impact of the Ukrainian language on the Polish literary language and dialects and a linguistic atlas of Subcarpathia (with M. Małecki, 2 parts, 500 maps, 1934). An edition of his selected writings (4 vols, 1954–5, 1958), his memoirs (1960), and a book about him by A. Gruszecka-Nitschowa (1977) have appeared.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]