Stieber, Zdzisław

Stieber, Zdzisław, b 7 June 1903 in Szczakowa, Chrzanów county, Poland, d 12 October 1980 in Warsaw. Polish linguist and Slavic philologist; member of the Polish Academy of Sciences from 1954. After graduating from Cracow University (PH D, 1929), he conducted fieldwork on the Lemko dialect and with Stefan Hrabec on the Boiko dialect (1934–9) and served as a professor at Lviv University (1937–9, 1944–5), Łódź University (1945–52), and Warsaw University (1952–66). He wrote numerous works on the history, dialects, and structure of Common Slavic, Polish, and other Slavic languages, including a number of important works in Ukrainian linguistics: a book on the toponomastics of the Lemko region (2 parts, 1948–9); a dialectal atlas of the Lemko region (8 fascicles with 416 maps, 1956–64), based on fieldwork in 72 settlements in 1934–5; and a posthumously published book on the phonetics and phonology of the Lemko dialect (1982). Many of his articles were reprinted as Świat językowy Słowian (The Linguistic World of the Slavs, 1974). Articles about him and a bibliography of his works were published as Zdzisław Stieber (1903–1980) in 1982.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]