Highlights of my work and anecdotes#
For some highlights, by which I mean smaller contributions that I think may be quite useful, see «Persephone», «Dialectology and the origin of Iliad and Odyssey», «Hinweise auf “Oral Poetry” im vulgärlateinischen Kontext der pompejanischen Wandinschriften», «Attische Vaseninschriften im Spannungsfeld zwischen Alphabet, Dialekt und Literatur», «Nereiden und Neoanalyse: ein Blick hinter die Ilias», «Abbreviated Writing», «The invention of the Latin letter G» (in Altlateinische Inschriften, pp. 324–33), «The genesis of the local alphabets of Archaic Greece» and «Die Erfindung des Alphabets: ein realistisches Szenario», «Recitationes: combining effective assessment with pleasurable listening».
One of the funniest situations in which I ever found myself in an academic context is the following: I just had finished my «Lizentiat» (equivalent to the M.A. degree) in Zürich, got an assistant's post and started my doctoral thesis, when our Professor, Ernst Risch, encouraged all of his students in Comparative historical linguistics to join him for the «VII. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft» that was to be held in Berlin on 20–25 February 1983. I therefore wrote a letter of application, exactly like all my colleagues. But unlike them I never got an answer. Finally, soon after New Year, I wrote again, and this time it worked: a few days later I got my confirmation as well as the programme and all necessary information.
I had almost forgotten the little incident when we travelled to Berlin full of joy and expectations and walked into the big entrance hall of «Freie Universität» in the famous building called «Rostlaube». In the hall there was a table, serving as a reception desk, where we queued up. At last it was my turn, and I had barely pronounced my name when an elegantly dressed elderly man, who had so far kept himself in the background, rushed forward towards me, almost about to give me a hug, it seemed, and after formally introducing himself as Professor Bernfried Schlerath, organiser of the conference, said: «How nice, Mr. Wachter! What a pleasure to see you here, safe and sound! You can't imagine how worried we all were!» I was completely flabbergasted but then took the courage to ask for the reason of their worries and this warm address of welcome. In the meantime, the entire Berlin staff had gathered around us. «But – don't you know? Well, my friend, you were a major topic of conversation here for several weeks!» etc. etc. In the end I was informed that they had sent me the conference documents just as they had done to all my Zürich colleagues, but mine had come back after a few days marked with a bold black stamp by the main post office of Winterthur, where I was still living at the time, saying: «Addressee deceased».
Fortunately the penny quickly dropped with me, and when I told them what must have been the reason, the bizarre atmosphere quickly gave way to a merry laughter of the whole round, with a slight mischievousness mixed in about the bad performance of the Swiss Post Office, normally known for its great reliability: about six months earlier, a distant great-uncle of mine, a highly esteemed reverend Rudolf Wachter, who was of course much better known in town than the young student I was then, had died, aged 93, in Wiesengrund nursing home, Winterthur.
