E. F. K. Koerner (5 February 1939 – 6 January 2022)

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Everyone who deals with the history of linguistics must have met with the name of E. F. K. Koerner. Last year, the sad news arrived that Koerner had died. His life was colourful and is known to those who know (see, e.g., Cowan -Foster 1989, Swiggers 1999 and most recently Joseph 2021), so here I will only mention its main stops. Koerner was born in a Grenzland: in Hofleben (Mlewiec) near Thorn (Toruń); this, perhaps, was the reason that he was aware that things are often not as clear as people not born in Grenzländer often think. After finishing high school in 1960 in Krefeld, where his family eventually settled, sharing the wanderer fate of many German families after WW II, he first served in the military, which apparently gave him what not a few intellectuals lack: the awareness that there are more important things than those they write about. It was not until 1968 that he finished his MA studies with a thesis on the German subjunctive submitted at the University of Gießen. More importantly, in 1971 he defended his dissertation on Saussure at Simon Fraser University in Canada, which was published in 1973 (Koerner 1973) . From then on, he worked continuously in the history of linguistics and became the most visible and active person in this field. In 1976, he even went "into the wilderness" and accepted the offer of an associate professorship at the University of Ottawa as the chance of lifetime, as he wrote himself, to advance the study of the history of the language sciences. Among his numerous activities, the most important was editing the journal Historiographia Linguistica and the series Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Sciences. After his retirement from the university in 2001, he returned home, to Berlin, but continued, with no less passion, his work in the historiography of linguistics. If I think about Koerner's work and the inspirations one can find in it, what first occurs to me is his appeal for specialization or professionalization in the historiography of linguistics: the demand for doing linguistic historiography not as a "byproduct", but as a separate discipline. This appeal is still relevant, or it at least seems to be, judging from the example provided by the volume of the Oxford Handbooks dedicated to the history of linguistics (Allan 2013) that is marked by a remarkable "non-professionalism": an absence of both criticism of the sources and a theoretical frame. It is symptomatic that Koerner did not participate in this volume. Another thing is, of course, to what extent such a demand for a "professional"