Polotsky was born inZürich,Switzerland, as the son of aBelarusian Jewish couple. He grew up inBerlin and studied Egyptology and Semitics at the universities ofBerlin andGöttingen. From 1926 to 1931 he was a co-worker of theSeptuaginta-Unternehmen of the Academy of Sciences at Göttingen. In 1929 he received his Ph.D. degree for the dissertationZu den Inschriften der 11. Dynastie. He worked in Berlin editingCopticManichaean texts from 1933 till 1934, with the Church historianCarl Schmidt. He left Germany in 1935 and settled inMandate Palestine, where he taught and researched at the Hebrew University inJerusalem, becoming professor in 1948. In 1953 he founded the Linguistics department there[1] and later served as the dean of the Faculty of Humanities. He died in Jerusalem.
His main achievement was theÉtudes de syntaxe copte published in 1944 which fundamentally changed the scientific view of the syntax of the Coptic and earlier ancient Egyptian languages. Polotsky's theory of the Egyptian verb (a particularly delicate argument, since Egyptians distinguished their different verb forms mainly by the vocalizations, and vowels were not written) had so much success that it has been calledthe Standard Theory.
In Berlin, Polotsky had been a student of the famous egyptologistKurt Heinrich Sethe; in Jerusalem, one of his students wasMiriam Lichtheim, known for her extensive translations of ancient Egyptian texts.
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