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Luise Hercus
Luise Anna Hercus AM FAHA, née Schwarzschild, (16 January 1926 – 15 April 2018) was a German-born linguist who lived in Australia from 1954. After significant early work on Middle Indo-Aryan dialects (Prakrits) she had specialised in Australian Aboriginal languages since 1963, when she took it up as a hobby. Works authored or co-authored by her are influential, and often among the primary resource materials on many languages of Australia.
Hercus was born Luise Anna Schwarzschild on 16 January 1926 in Munich, Germany, to the artist Alfred and his wife, Theodora Schwarzschild. The family descended from a long line of rabbis, merchants and intellectuals. Her uncle was the noted astronomer and physicist Karl Schwarzschild. On the assumption of power in Germany by Hitler, their position as Jewish people rapidly deteriorated, despite financial assistance from an uncle who had emigrated to the United States. With her family, she took refuge in England in 1938, and the family settled in East Finchley, in northern London, where she attended Tollington Hill School. Due to the air raids on London, the family moved to Hampstead Gardens. At 17, Hercus won a scholarship to St Anne's College, Oxford, where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in Oriental Studies in 1946, followed by an M.A.
In 1948, she was appointed tutor and lecturer at St Anne's College, a position she held until 1954, when she emigrated to Australia. She married the scientist Graham Robertson Hercus, on 23 February 1955 (died 1974). Together they had one child, Iain Robertson Hercus, who obtained a doctorate in astronomy.
From 1965 to 1969, Hercus was a research fellow at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. It was at that time that she began to pursue private studies in Aboriginal languages, managing to pull some from the brink of oblivion, as for example with Wangganguru, which she recorded with the assistance of her informant, Mick McLean Irinjili. She also worked with Ben Murray who she would later collaborate in relation to the Diyari language as well. Many of the interviews that Hercus recorded with Murray related to Aboriginal perspectives on the Afghan cameleers who the Wangkangurru people called wadjabala maḍimaḍi which translates as 'white fellows with hair-string.
After 1969, she took up an appointment as senior lecturer, and then reader, in Sanskrit, in the Department of South Asian and Buddhist Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra.
In the 1970s, Hercus, along with Peter K. Austin and David Trefry, did research on the Diyari language.
Hercus had been publishing significant articles on linguistic features of Middle Indo-Aryan dialects (Prakrits) since 1953 (using her maiden name), and a collected volume reprinting and indexing them was published by the ANU Faculty of Asian Studies in 1991 (her last article on the topic was in 1979).
After 1991, she became a visiting fellow in the Department of Linguistics at ANU, writing up grammars, dictionaries and traditional texts, and continuing fieldwork, mainly in the north of South Australia and adjacent areas of New South Wales and Queensland.
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Luise Hercus
Luise Anna Hercus AM FAHA, née Schwarzschild, (16 January 1926 – 15 April 2018) was a German-born linguist who lived in Australia from 1954. After significant early work on Middle Indo-Aryan dialects (Prakrits) she had specialised in Australian Aboriginal languages since 1963, when she took it up as a hobby. Works authored or co-authored by her are influential, and often among the primary resource materials on many languages of Australia.
Hercus was born Luise Anna Schwarzschild on 16 January 1926 in Munich, Germany, to the artist Alfred and his wife, Theodora Schwarzschild. The family descended from a long line of rabbis, merchants and intellectuals. Her uncle was the noted astronomer and physicist Karl Schwarzschild. On the assumption of power in Germany by Hitler, their position as Jewish people rapidly deteriorated, despite financial assistance from an uncle who had emigrated to the United States. With her family, she took refuge in England in 1938, and the family settled in East Finchley, in northern London, where she attended Tollington Hill School. Due to the air raids on London, the family moved to Hampstead Gardens. At 17, Hercus won a scholarship to St Anne's College, Oxford, where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in Oriental Studies in 1946, followed by an M.A.
In 1948, she was appointed tutor and lecturer at St Anne's College, a position she held until 1954, when she emigrated to Australia. She married the scientist Graham Robertson Hercus, on 23 February 1955 (died 1974). Together they had one child, Iain Robertson Hercus, who obtained a doctorate in astronomy.
From 1965 to 1969, Hercus was a research fellow at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. It was at that time that she began to pursue private studies in Aboriginal languages, managing to pull some from the brink of oblivion, as for example with Wangganguru, which she recorded with the assistance of her informant, Mick McLean Irinjili. She also worked with Ben Murray who she would later collaborate in relation to the Diyari language as well. Many of the interviews that Hercus recorded with Murray related to Aboriginal perspectives on the Afghan cameleers who the Wangkangurru people called wadjabala maḍimaḍi which translates as 'white fellows with hair-string.
After 1969, she took up an appointment as senior lecturer, and then reader, in Sanskrit, in the Department of South Asian and Buddhist Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra.
In the 1970s, Hercus, along with Peter K. Austin and David Trefry, did research on the Diyari language.
Hercus had been publishing significant articles on linguistic features of Middle Indo-Aryan dialects (Prakrits) since 1953 (using her maiden name), and a collected volume reprinting and indexing them was published by the ANU Faculty of Asian Studies in 1991 (her last article on the topic was in 1979).
After 1991, she became a visiting fellow in the Department of Linguistics at ANU, writing up grammars, dictionaries and traditional texts, and continuing fieldwork, mainly in the north of South Australia and adjacent areas of New South Wales and Queensland.