Biography
As a student of classical philology at the University of Zurich (1940-1947), he began to take an interest in linguistics. Initially, he studied ancient Indo-European languages, Sanskrit and ancient Iranian under the Indo-Europeanist Manu Leumann. He soon turned his attention to the modern languages of Europe, the Slavic languages, but in particular Modern Greek. In 1947, he obtained a diploma for the higher teaching profession in ancient languages and a doctorate in philosophy with the thesis "Die primären griechischen Steigerungsformen", which was published in Hamburg in 1950.
In Paris (1947-1950), he familiarized himself with the theoretical foundations of French structuralism. There he attended the courses of Émile Benveniste - according to Seiler, one of the "pioneers of linguistic universality research", whom he regarded as a mentor and who influenced his work. In the following years, he worked as a research assistant at the C.N.R.S. (center national de la recherche scientifique), where he concentrated on researching modern Greek. The result was the monograph "L'aspect et le temps dans le verbe néo-grec", Paris 1952, Les Belles Lettres, which he submitted as a habilitation thesis to the University of Hamburg.
In Hamburg (1951-53 and 1956-59), where he taught as a lecturer and then as a professor, he maintained intensive contacts with the non-European language departments there. With a profound knowledge of European functionalist structuralism, he went to the USA on a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation (1953-1955) to get to know the American structuralist tradition. There he also familiarized himself with Native American languages, among other things. In 1955, he became a researcher at the "Survey of California Indian Languages" in Berkely under the direction of Mary Haas.
Using an anthropological-linguistic approach to linguistic research, he studied the language of the Cahuilla (the endangered North American Indians in southern California) and wrote a grammar, a dictionary and a collection of texts with English translations.
Back in Germany (1956), he resumed his work in Hamburg. Shortly afterwards (1959), he was appointed to the Chair of General and Comparative Linguistics at the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Cologne. The commission that recommended him as the successor to Prof. Dr. Hans Karstiens described Seiler's research interests as follows (in an expert opinion from 1959): "His research started from the basis of classical philology (...). In his habilitation thesis and in a series of essays also devoted to Modern Greek, the questions of 'classical' structuralism in phonetics, syntax and form theory predominate."
In 1965, Seiler returned to the United States, where he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California (1965-1966) and a visiting professor, where he became acquainted with the different kind of American structuralism and its negation by generative grammar. In the meantime, at Seiler's request, the Institute of Linguistics in Cologne was divided into two separate departments: one for General Linguistics, the other for Historical-Comparative Linguistics (then headed by Professor Jürgen Untermann). After Seiler's return, he and Untermann set up a linguistic working group called the "Linguistic Workshop" in 1967, which was later continued as a colloquium.
His experience with the languages of the world and his many years of dealing with questions of language theory formed the basis for Seiler's most important contribution to linguistics: the UNITYP project (1972-1992), a comprehensive project of the German Research Foundation (1978-1992), which was of central importance for the research activities of the Cologne Institute for Linguistics. In this project, he answered questions about the universal basic laws of languages spoken worldwide and about language typologies. Seiler brought together linguists, whose specializations reflected the diversity of languages as far as possible, with logicians, philosophers and neurologists. Based on the assumption that people everywhere have the same experiences with their environment and their own existence and that they process these experiences in their world of thought as fundamental concepts, he postulated in his UNITYP project on the one hand that certain concepts are expressed in all languages of the world; on the other hand, that the languages each have a more or less broad selection of formal solutions at their disposal. According to Seiler, this explains the variety of possible expressions for one and the same concept that can be found in cross-language comparisons. Seiler supervised the project after his retirement and until 2002.
In 2001, he handed over the holdings of Seiler's private library, which he had collected for over half a century, to the Aargau Cantonal Library for use. The private library includes works on classical philology, philosophy, structuralism and language typology, language descriptions and, in particular, an extensive collection on American Indian languages, including rare publications from North and Central America. It reflects the linguist's broad interests and is a valuable corpus for language theorists, universal researchers, language typologists and those interested in human language in general.
After his retirement, Seiler lived in Lenzburg (Switzerland) and continued to work on the problems of universality in language.
Hansjakob Seiler died on August 13, 2018 at the advanced age of 97.
Sources: WIKIPEDIA, Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, Jacques François et Pierre Swiggers, Hansjakob Seiler: notice bio-bibliographique; Leuven, Centre international de dialectologie générale, 2008, pp. 23-42.