Jan Otrębski

Otrębski was born in 1889 to an intellectual family in Pilica, Silesian Voivodeship.[1] He studied at the University of Warsaw, where he met Yefemiy Karski who was the supervisor of his first thesis "Description of Byelorussian dialects in Vilnius Province", during which he also came into contact with the Lithuanian language. The work received a gold medal, and Otrębski was titled "Primus Inter Pares".[1]

During 1914 he studied for his doctorate in the German Leipzig University, and managed to complete his doctoral dissertation in comparative linguistics by early 1915. However, the outbreak of World War I prevented him from completing his education. He was interned, and worked for a time in a German brick factory. Later during the war he moved to Kalisz where he worked as a teacher. When the war ended, Otrębski submitted his doctoral thesis, titled "Contributions to a comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages" (Polish: Przyczynki do gramatyki porównawczej języków indoeuropejskich) to professor Jan Michał Rozwadowski at Jagiellonian University, and he defended the dissertation in 1920.[1]

After receiving his doctorate, he became associated with the Polish Stefan Batory University, becoming a professor. He studied the Lithuanian dialect in Tverečius between 1928 and 1934. During World War II he at Vilnius University. After the war, in 1947, he founded the Chair of Baltic Philology in the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.[1]

Otrębski was the author of 350 scientific papers in the field of Slavic and Baltic studies, of which more than 100 were devoted to the study of the Lithuanian language. He founded the Lingua Posnaniensis journal. His three volume work titled Grammar of contemporary Lithuanian (Polish: Gramatyka języka litewskiego) is considered to be his opus magnum.[1]

Otrębski died on 26 April 1971 in Poznań, where he is buried.[2]