The paper presents a synthesis of the history and achievements of Polish linguistics cultivated at the Jagiellonian University since the second half of the 19th century till this day. The beginnings are the first lectures which discussed the Polish language, followed by the creation of chairs, then the institute, and finally a separate Faculty of Polish Studies. The author interweaves the institutional and personal threads, and indicates the most important figures of old professors whose works were central to the development of Polish linguistics and its various fields.
The article presents a general characteristic of Stanisław Rospond’s academic and organizational activity in Silesia in the first years after World War II. This Polish and Slavic linguist, born near Cracow, a graduate of the Jagiellonian University, fascinated by the history of Silesia, moved to Wrocław in 1945. In that city, together with a group of professors from Lviv (Polish: Lwów), he set about rebuilding Polish academic research, organizing Polish linguistics with a focus on Silesian studies.
Tomasz Szumski (1778–1840) was a polyglot, teacher, bookseller, author of school textbooks, associated with Greater Poland. His grammar book, released in 1809, is the first Polish-language grammar book of the Polish language published in the 19th century where the grammatical description of Polish is made independent of the description of Latin. It is at the same time the first known 19th-century grammar of Polish where the author dared to polemicise with Onufry Kopczyński’s ideas contained in the Polish–Latin Grammatyka dla szkół narodowych (Grammar for national schools).
The article illustrates the history of the Department of Polish Language at the Pedagogical University of Cracow. The author presents the scholars who, while working in the Department, greatly contributed to the development of Polish linguistics. Additionally, he summarizes their main research works.
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