Hans Jakob Polotsky

Polotsky was born in Zürich, Switzerland, as the son of a Belarusian Jewish couple.In 1929 he received his Ph.D. degree for the dissertation Zu den Inschriften der 11.He worked in Berlin editing Coptic Manichaean texts from 1933 till 1934, with the Church historian Carl Schmidt.He left Germany in 1935 and settled in Mandate Palestine, where he taught and researched at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, becoming professor in 1948.Polotsky's theory of the Egyptian verb (a particularly delicate argument, since Egyptians distinguished their different verb forms mainly by the vocalizations, and vowels were not written) had so much success that it has been called the Standard Theory.
ZurichJerusalemHebrewSemitic languagesEgyptologyHebrew University of JerusalemZürichSwitzerlandBelarusian JewishBerlinGöttingenCopticManichaeanCarl SchmidtMandate Palestinethe Standard TheoryKurt Heinrich SetheMiriam LichtheimIsrael PrizeHarvey PrizeW. KohlhammerList of Israel Prize recipientsUllendorff, Edward