Witold Taszycki (20 June 1898 – 9 August 1979) was a Polish linguist. He specialized in Polish onomastics and historical dialectology.[1][2]
Taszycki was born on 20 June 1898 in Zagórzany, Austria-Hungary. He studied Polish and Slavic philology at Jagiellonian University (1917–1921). After defending his doctorate in 1922, he became an assistant in the Department of Indo-European Linguistics of Jagiellonian University. In 1925 he received his postdoctoral degree, and in 1929 lectured at the Stefan Batory University of Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania). Shortly afterwards, he was awarded a professorship at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), where he remained after the outbreak of World War II. During the occupation of Poland, he was involved in secret university teaching.[2]
After the war, he co-organised Slavic and Polish studies at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and at the University of Wrocław (1945–1946). In 1946 he became a professor of Jagiellonian University, where over his career he chaired the departments of Slavonic Onomastics, Old Polish Philology, and Polish Language. He was a member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Polish Academy of Sciences, and participated in works of post-war Commission for the Determination of Place Names.[2]
Taszycki was an expert on Old Polish and had studied nearly all known manuscripts and publications written in that language. He contributed significantly to the development of onomastic research in Poland.[2]
His "Dictionary of Old Polish Personal Names" remains a fundamental work of reference on Polish nomenclature. It contains information gathered from sources ranging from the oldest known records to the year 1500.[2] "An ortographic dictionary and the rules of Polish spelling", which he co-authored with Stanisław Jodłowski, was the most popular Polish orthographic dictionary in the interwar period.[3]
He died on 9 August 1979 in Kraków.[2]
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