Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz ( * 16 March 1840 in Poschwitz; † 10 December 1893 in Charlottenburg) was a German linguist and Sinologist. He is considered a pioneer of modern synchronic linguistics.

Biography

Georg von der Gabelentz came from the Saxon noble Gabelentz family based at Poschwitz Castle. He was the son of Hans Conon von der Gabelentz (1807-1874), who is said to have spoken 24 languages, was one of the founders of the German Oriental Society and held several political offices.

Gabelentz learned Dutch, Italian and Chinese at the Friedrichgymnasium (Altenburg). From 1860 he studied law and cameralistics at the University of Jena. In the same year he was accepted into the Corps Franconia Jena. After his examinations, he entered the Saxon civil service as an administrative lawyer in Dresden in 1864. At the same time he continued his studies of Chinese, Japanese and Manchurian in Leipzig. In 1872, he married Alexandra von Rothkirch. In 1876, he completed his doctorate with a translation of a philosophical text from Chinese. On 1 July 1878, at his suggestion, an associate professorship of East Asian languages was established in Leipzig, and he held this post. It was the first academic post in the German-speaking world specifically devoted to Chinese and Japanese.

Gabelentz also worked on Manchurian, Mongolian, Tibetan and Malay, but his main work is considered to be his Grammar of Classical Chinese, which appeared in 1881.

Friedrich Hirth wrote about this work:

Of all the Chinese grammars so far published this is the most perfect, in as much as it unites with the fulness of Prémare’s work the scholarly clearness of Schott’s “Chinesische Sprachlehre”.

The grammar was reprinted unchanged in 1953 and has since gone through several editions.

Gabelentz edited the International Journal of General Linguistics with Friedrich Techmer (1843–1891) in 1884-1889.

Among his students in Leipzig were the German Sinologists Wilhelm Grube (1855–1908) and J. J. M de Groot (1854-1921), the Austrian Sinologist Arthur von Rosthorn (1862–1945), the Japanologist Karl Florenz (1865-1939), the archaeologist Max Uhle (1856–1944), the Tibetologist Heinrich Wenzel and the art historian Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Müller (1863–1930).

In 1889, Georg von der Gabelentz’s marriage was divorced. He was appointed full professor of East Asian languages and general linguistics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences on 27 June 1889. In 1891, he married Gertrud von Adelebsen, née Freiin von Oldershausen. In the same year he published another important work, Die Sprachwissenschaft, in which he presents the theory of cyclic language change and the aims and tasks of linguistics. It is sometimes claimed, for example by Eugenio Coseriu, that Gabelentz anticipated Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between langage, langue and parole and other terms found in Saussure’s work. He continued his father’s work with a book on the genetic classification of Austronesian languages.

Posthumously, a very modern sketch of a research programme of language typology was published (Gabelentz 1894), which anticipated later developments in quantitative linguistics.