Josef Beneš


Josef Beneš was a Czech linguist, specialising in anthroponymy and onomastics.

Life

Beneš was born on 11 January 1902 in Prachatice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary. He was born into a family of opticians and initially trained as an optician. However, his parents allowed him to study at the gymnasium in Prachatice. In 1926–1930, he studied Bohemistics and Germanistics at the Charles University in Prague. Later, he worked in several places as a teacher in schools providing secondary education, including Prachatice, Mukachevo, Soběslav, Kladno and Prague.
After World War II, Beneš briefly worked at the Ministry of Education, then returned to teaching. From the beginning of the 1960s, he lectured at pedagogic institutes in Liberec and Ústí nad Labem. After 1968, as a result of normalization and changing political conditions in Czechoslovakia, he was forced to retire. Beneš died on 17 December 1984 in Prague.
Beneš belongs, together with Vladimír Šmilauer, Jan Svoboda and Antonín Profous, among founders of Czech anthroponymy and onomastics.

Selected works

Since 1933, Beneš published articles about Czech surnames in specialised journals. In 1962 he published book About Czech Surnames. His daughter, Dobrava Moldanová, collected many of his articles into book Our Surnames. Posthumously German Surnames of Czechs was published in 1998, with Marie Nováková as an editor.