Reinhold Aman, 1936–2019

Reinhold Albert Aman was born on April 8, 1936 in Fürstenzell, a small Bavarian market town near the Austrian border, and was raised in nearby Straubing and Oberschneiding.He studied chemical engineering in Augsburg and worked as a chemical analyst in Frankfurt and Munich before emigrating to North America in 1957.After spending several more years in the chemical industry in Montreal and Milwaukee, he embarked on a new course of studies, obtaining a Bachelor's degree in German and Secondary Education from the University of Wisconsin in 1965 and a Ph.D. in German Language and Literature from the University of Texas in 1968.His doctoral thesis analyzed the myriad battle scenes in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, a 13th-century Arthurian epic.In 1968 he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he taught German, philology, and medieval literature.It was in a 1966 seminar on structural dialectology that Aman's study of aggression began its shift from the physical to the verbal.Aman was translating the original 1876 phrase list for Georg Wenker's Deutscher Sprachatlas into his native Straubinger dialect; included in the list was the phrase, "Ich schlage dich gleich mit dem Kochlöffel um die Ohren, du Affe." ("I'm going to knock you on the ears with a cooking spoon, you monkey.")Why, Aman wondered, would anyone call another human being a monkey?And what other animal names do we use as insults?Aman hit the books, and before the night was over, he had compiled over 200 further offensive metaphors.This list became the basis of his Bayrischösterreichisches Schimpfwörterbuch, a 206-page lexicon of Austro-Bavarian insults that was eventually published in 1973.In the intervening years, Aman broadened and deepened his research into verbal aggression, enthusiastically collecting, cataloguing, and analyzing over 4000 articles, books, chapters, dissertations, and other materials on the subject

Central European national history · Linguistic research and analysis · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy