Georgios Hatzidakis
Greek linguist and university professor
Georgios Nicolaou Hatzidakis, a.k.a. Georgios Nikolaou Chatzidakis (Greek: Γεώργιος Νικολάου Χατζιδάκις; 23 November [O.S. 11 November] 1843, in Myrthios, Ottoman Crete – 28 June 1941, in Athens) was a Greek philologist, who is regarded as the father of linguistics in Greece. He was the first chair of Linguistics and Indian Philology at the University of Athens in 1890–1923.
Life and work
His family was traditionally part of the Cretan revolts against the Ottoman Empire. His grandfather Kyriakos had taken part as a captain in the uprising of 1821. After his schooling at Rethymno, Georgios at the age of 18 fought himself by the side of his father in the uprising of 1866. After a three-year school visit in Athens, Chatzidakis was enrolled at the faculty of philosophy of the University of Athens for classical philology. In 1877, he won in a university competition a scholarship for linguistics study in Germany, which he pursued afterwards at the University of Leipzig with Georg Curtius and Karl Brugmann. Since then, Chatzidakis remained in contact with German researchers, as for example the more than 15 years his junior Albert Thumb (de) whose obituary he later wrote. After his return to Greece, Chatzidakis was first a grammar school teacher in Athens and was conferred a doctorate the next year with a thesis entitled Συμβολή εις την Ιστορίαν της Ελληνικής Γλώσσης ("Contribution to the History of the Greek Language") at the university there.
“Georgios Hatzidakis” enters the record as greek linguist and university professor. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Georgios, Hatzidakis and Greek can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q833774. VIAF identifies the subject as 72146640. The Library of Congress control number is nr89017339. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1843, 1941, 1890 and 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “Georgios Hatzidakis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.