Henri (Hirsch) Wittmann was born in
Alsace in 1937. After studying with
André Martinet at the
Sorbonne, he moved to North America and taught successively at the
University of Colorado at Boulder, the
University of Alberta in Edmonton, the
University of Windsor and
McGill University in
Montreal before teaching in the French university system of
Quebec, the
Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and at
Rimouski as well as the
Université de Sherbrooke. He retired from teaching in 1997, after an extensive tour of teaching and conferencing in
France. In the following years, he became the first Director of the Presses universitaires de Trois-Rivières and emeritus researcher at the Centre d’Analyse des Littératures Francophones des Amériques (CALIFA) at
Carleton University in
Ottawa. As a comparatist, Wittmann contributed to the study of the
morphology of a number of languages and language families: Pre-Indo-European,
Indo-European (
Hittite,
Italic,
Romance,
Germanic,
Creole),
Afro-Asiatic (
Egyptian),
African (
Mande,
Kwa,
Bantu),
Austronesian (
Malagasy,
Polynesian),
Amerindian (
Arawakan,
Cariban). His work between 1963 and 2002 includes more than 140 items. He is a life member since 1962 of the
Linguistic Society of America (LSA). In 1965, he cofounded with
André Rigault and
Douglas Ellis the Linguistics Department at McGill University. In 1981, he was the cofounder, with
Normand Beauchemin and
Robert Fournier, of the Linguistic Society of Quebec (
Association québécoise de linguistique) which he served for 10 years as president, secretary general and organizer of the annual meeting. In 1981 as well, he became the first Editor of the
Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée, a responsibility he assumed for the following 20 years. Politically, Wittmann is known for his
anarcho-syndicalist sympathies with strong links to the CNTU (
Confederation of National Trade Unions), communautary and anti-war movements. In 1974-1978, he was at the center of a union conflict at the University of Quebec which changed the landscape of collective bargaining in the academic world. A specialist of the linguistic heritage of Quebec, he also is a stout defender of Quebec independence. ==Contributions to linguistics==