Uczeni i ich losy… – Mirosław Skarżyński jako badacz dziejów polskiej lingwistyki

Abstract

Scholars and Their Fates… – Mirosław Skarżyński as a Researcher of the History of Polish Linguistics
 The paper presents Mirosław Skarżyński’s studies in the field of the history of Polish linguistics, and their consecutive phases: history of ideas (concepts, grammatical descriptions); history of people – researchers who once laid the foundations of scientific linguistics; and history of institutions. The emerging picture reveals that the research procedure adopted by Skarżyński was analogous to the method of historical sciences which demand that facts of the past should be described based on direct source information. In this perspective, the description of Polish linguistics must have been preceded by a considerable number of detailed studies, and publication of sources. Skarżyński put particular emphasis on the edition of memoirs and correspondence from the past. He saw in them not merely a complementary fond of information in research on the history of ideas and institutions, but primarily a road to understanding the personalities and fates of past scholars, as well as the conditions in which Polish scientific linguistics was born.