Miroslav Komárek


Miroslav Komárek was a Czech historical linguist and professor emeritus of the Faculty of Arts at Palacký University in Olomouc. His academic publications focused on the morphology and phonology of the Czech language from the diachronic perspective.

Early life

Komárek was born in the Moravian village of Lazníky near Přerov. He graduated from a gymnasium in Olomouc in 1943, but was deployed as a labourer until the end of the wartime occupation. After the war he majored in Czech and Russian at Charles University in Prague, then returned to Olomouc, and obtained a doctor of philosophy degree from Palacký University in 1949.

Academic career

Komárek began to teach at the Faculty of Arts at Palacký University after completing his doctorate, where he went on to spend his entire professional career, spanning over six decades. His first major work, published in 1958, was the first in a series of textbooks on Czech historical linguistics, focused on phonetics. In 1962 he habilitated and twenty years later obtained the title of Doctor of Science. In 1979 he published Příspěvky k české morfologii, which became an oft cited work in papers on Czech morphology. In 2005 he became a professor emeritus at Palacký University. A year before his death, in 2012 he published Dějiny českého jazyka, which was a summary of his academic work.
He was heavily influenced by the Prague linguistic circle, and represented their school of thought, structural linguistics, on the international stage within the field of Slavic studies. He also cited prominent Czech philologist Jan Gebauer as a major influence; his 1982 work outlining the phonological development of Czech referenced and commented on Gebauer's historical grammar extensively. He was a regular contributor to the Czech Language Institute's journal Slovo a slovesnost, eventually joining the editorial board of that journal.

Published works