Gerhard Doerfer

Who is Gerhard Doerfer?

Gerhard Doerfer was a German Turkologist, Altaist, and philologist best known for his studies of the Turkish language.

Doerfer spent his childhood in Königsberg and Berlin. After release from captivity following the World War II, from 1949 to 1954 he took in Berlin courses in Turkic and Altaic languages, Islamic and Iranian Studies. In 1955–57 he was an assistant professor in Mainz University, in 1960 he moved to the Göttingen University, where in 1966 he became an associate professor. Between 1968 and 1973 he conducted several expeditions to research the Turkic Khalaj and Oguz languages in Persia. In 1970 Doerfer became a professor of a newly founded for him Chair of Turkic and Altaistic Studies at the Georgia Augusta Göttingen University; in 1975–1976 Doerfer served a tour of a Visiting Professor at Istanbul University. In his extensive and multi-faceted studies, Doerfer investigated Mongolian and Turkic elements in Persian language, culture, and folklore, wrote his four-volume Türkische und mongolische Elemente im Neupersischen, and contributed greatly to the study of Persian-Turkic language contacts.

Doerfer dismissed the validity of the Altaic language family concept, demonstrating that the words and features shared by Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic were cultural borrowings, and any other similarities should be attributed to chance resemblances, because while there are lexical elements shared separately by Turkic and Mongolic, separately by Mongolic and Tungusic, and some elements shared by all three languages, there are few elements shared by the Turkic and Tungusic but not Mongolic language. If all three languages were genetically connected, the losses should be random, not limited to the geographical fringes of the family; the observed patterns exactly match the effects of borrowing.