[Lingtyp] Obituary: Johannes Helmbrecht

[Corinna Handschuh]

Dear Colleagues,

It is with great sadness that we have to inform you that Johannes Helmbrecht
passed away on 5 May 2024 after short but serious illness. Johannes was still
organizing a workshop at the upcoming ALT conference, and it is very shocking
how suddenly he left us.

Johannes made significant contributions to linguistic typology. Throughout his
career he remained fascinated by the ways person markers develop and change in
the world’s languages. This was the topic of his habilitation as well as of a
number of articles in various of our discipline’s journals. Fieldwork and
language description were also a topic close to his heart. After an initial
focus on the languages of the Caucasus during his student days in Bonn, the
Siouan languages became his main specialization. Having made contact with the
Hoocąk community during a stay at Chicago, he later initiated and carried out a
documentation project on the language. Up to his untimely death, he continued
working on the grammatical description of Hoocąk. In recent years, much of his
research was directed towards the grammatical properties of proper nouns,
especially personal names, in the languages of the world.

Johannes had been Chair of General and Comparative Linguistics at the
University of Regensburg since 2007. His PhD was awarded from the University of
Bonn, and he spent time as a researcher at the University of Chicago, at the
University of Cologne, and at the University of Erfurt, where he wrote his
Habilitation under Prof. Christian Lehmann.

Until the very end, Johannes was a dedicated supervisor, researcher, lecturer
and colleague. His friendly and warm-hearted manner and his great willingness
to help and support others were greatly appreciated by his staff, colleagues
and students. We all will miss him very much.

Information on how to sign the condolence book (including a link to a digital
version) can be found on the website of the Regensburg linguistics department:

https://www.uni-regensburg.de/sprache-literatur-kultur/allgemeine-vergleichende-sprachwissenschaft/aktuelles/index.html

Our thoughts are with Johannes’ wife and family.

Corinna Handschuh,
Linda Konnerth,
Iren Hartmann
and Bruno Olsson