Przyczynki do historii Towarzystwa Miłośników Języka Polskiego

Contributions to the History of the Society of Friends of the Polish LanguageTowarzystwo Miłośników Języka Polskiego (‘Society of Friends of the Polish Language’) is the oldest such society and greatly distinguished for the popularization of knowledge about the language, and also for the knowledge about Polish itself. The few publications devoted to it, written mostly on the occasion of anniversaries, tend to overlook the figure of Andrzej Gawroński (1885–1927), an outstanding expert in Sanskrit, a linguist, and a professor of the Lviv University, despite the fact that archive materials show that he played a very significant role in the creation of the Society, and even penned the preliminary version of its charter. This paper presents Gawroński’s part in the forming of TMJP; it is based on extant letters from A. Gawroński to Kazimierz Nitsch from years 1919–1921 (Archive of Science of PAN and PAU in Cracow), letters from K. Nitsch to linguists Henryk Ułaszyn and Antonina Obrębska-Jabłońska, and also on the few printed materials from years 1918–1927.