Jurgis Gerulis – mokslininkas ir žmogus

LITHUANIAN LANGUAGE QUESTIONS XXXVI (1996) LITHUANIAN LANGUAGE: RESEARCHERS AND STUDIES JURGIS GERULIS — A SCIENTIFIC AND A MANJurgis Gerulis was one of the greatest Lithuanian and Baltic scholars of the interwar period. He was born on August 3, 1888 in Jogauduose, near Vilkyškiai (today Šilutės rajonas), in a peasant family. He graduated from Tilžės gymnasium in 1909 and studied comparative linguistics and classical philology at the universities of Karaliaučius and Berlin. In 1912 he defended his doctoral dissertation. He was a professor at the University of Leipzig. In 1934, he returned to Karaliaučiai and for some time was the rector of this university. In 1937 he moved to the University of Berlin, outraged by the local administration's change of Lithuanian place names in East Prussia to German ones, he did not want to contribute to this wicked work. In 1933, he joined the Nationalist Party (led by his wife, who came from a high-ranking Latvian German aristocratic family) and was appointed to high-ranking administrative positions. In May 1945 he was arrested by the Soviet security on a sick night and disappeared. | Gerulis's main contribution to Lithuanian studies was in the study of Lithuanian dialects and ancient writings. He was particularly active in the field of dialectology. He is considered the pioneer of modern Lithuanian dialectology outside Lithuania. His most important work in this field is the monograph "Studies of Lithuanian dialectology"*, published in German in 1930. Gerulis was the first to apply the so-called Copenhagen transcription to Lithuanian dialects, which later played a very important role in the development of our dialectology. In this work he investigated and described the vagaries of Lithuanian common language and dialects, gave examples of the most important dialects with their dialectological characteristics. Until his death, Gerulis himself studied and taught others to study Lithuanian dialects by means of instrumental phonetics. He was awarded several awards for his work (1930, 1933, 1935, 1937). In addition, he led dialectology courses in Kaunas in 1931-1933. Together with Chr. In 1933 Stangu published a monograph in German language "Lithuanian fishermen- 's dialect in Prussia"*. Both together researched and unique She's got a mouthful of shit, but she couldn't finish it. After the war, Stangas published his notes, and Gerulis’ collections of material were lost, at least so far no one has found them. 1 Lithuanian Dialect Studies by Georg Gerullis with 8 X-rays and 20 cymography images. Leipzig, 1930. Lithuanian fishermen's dialect in Prussia. Written by J. Gerullis and Chr. Sta ng’a-s. Kaunas, 1933. Stan g Chr. S. The Lithuanian dialect of Zasėčiai in the Vilnius area. —Journal of Linguistics 18, Oslo, 1958, 171—201. ko not to hear about them. The same fate befell ir jo accumulated material about Gervėčių ir The Speech of Lazūnai (for Lietuvos The Republic). Kita Gerulis’s field of scientific interest is — the study of ancient Lithuanian language monuments. In 1922 he published a photographed collection of Mažvydas’ writings. Some of the texts were found in the King's archives. After the war, some of the originals were lost. Although there are now newer reprinted publications of Mažvydas’ writings, Gerulio’s is the most important and still has great scientific value to this day, even though not all of his published texts have survived in their original form. In 1927, he published an excellent chrestomacy of Lithuanian ancient writings, which is still used today. It remains one of the main teaching tools for the study of the history of the Lithuanian language in higher education institutions and is widely used for scientific research. He has found and published a number of smaller old Lithuanian texts, many archive data about them. Among other things, he studied the biography of J. Bretkūnas. Gerulis has done a great deal of research on the history of Lithuanian language in Prussia. He was interested in the problems of social linguistics, especially Lithuanian and German bilingualism. He described the process of Germanization of his native village, his family. He was a great erudite Baltist. His work on Prussia is important, especially the study of Prussian toponyms. In 1912, he defended his doctoral dissertation in Latin, titled "On the Prussian Placenames of the Semba River". He continued to investigate the Prussian local names later. In 1922 he published a significant work in German "Old Prussian Place Names"*, and also published smaller works on Prussian studies in the German, Lithuanian and Latvian press. He also wrote about Latin literature. He is also a prolific pedagogue. He contributed greatly to the education of the young generation of Lithuanian linguists in the interwar period. After the unexpected death of K. Būga, who had not been able to prepare his successors in Kaunas University in a short time, the tragic situation of Lithuanian linguistics was improved by none other than Gerulis. His pupils were the two prominent interwar Lithuanian linguists, professors Pranas Skardžius and Antanas Salys, as well as Jonas Kabelka, who worked at Vilnius University after the war, Elzė Mikalauskaitė, who worked at the Pedagogical Institute, and in exile Kazis Alminas (Alminauskis) and Izabelė Matusevičiūtė. As a person, Gerulis was a controversial and tragic personality, torn in different directions by the circumstances. For him, Lithuanian studies were a sacred science, and Lithuanian language facts were precious. This is evident even from the refusal to contribute to the Germanization of the Lithuanian names in East Prussia. Hitler's party member did not obey the party in this case. But all his life working in MAZVYDAS. The oldest monuments of Lithuanian language up to 1570. Printed by Dr. Jurgis Gerullis. Kaunas, 1922. Newest: M or t Y nas Mažvydas Catechism and other writings. Catechism and other writings. Vilnius: Vilnius University Press, 1993. 6 Old Lithuanian "ay I part. Texts with introductions. It was repaired by Jurgis. Gerullis. Kaunas, 192 De Prussicis Sambiensium locorum nominainibus. Tilsit, 1912. 8 The Old Prussian Place Names. Berlin—Leipzig, 1922. 10 Among the Germans, Gerulis gradually absorbed Germanism, his spirit and thinking coincided with the Germans, although until the end of the century he was proud of his Lithuanian origin. All this led to a negative attitude towards Gerulis and a one-sided evaluation of his work by many of the intellectuals of the time, who did not know him and his work closely, forgetting his great merits for Lithuanian language science. Perhaps this meant the tragic end of Gerulis's life. In Vilnius, shortly after the war, rumors were spread among linguists that the people who led Lithuanian science (the accused Juozas Žiugžda) had answered negatively to the question from Moscow whether Lithuania needed Gerulis. It is impossible to verify how much of this is true. There is no doubt, however, that if Gerulis had been awarded, Lithuanian linguists would have come on their feet at least a decade earlier, and Baltic studies in Lithuania would have flourished not in the eighteenth, but in the sixties or even sixties. It would not have been necessary to start from scratch, discovering other long-discovered Americas. 11