Words and Numbers

Foreword Writing a foreword for a memorial volume seems to be much harder than writing one for a Festschrift. No Festschrift had been dedicated to Peter Grzybek during his lifetime, since he had only passed his 60th year of life. Moreover, Peter wasn’t a friend of more or less reflected academic tradition and he viewed the fashion for Festschriften with a certain degree of scepticism. However, we believe: honour where honour is due and memory where memory is due. We therefore decided to publish a memorial volume for Peter. The idea for this was born quite quickly after his passing away and we decided to ask his close academic colleagues and friends to honour Peter in this way. Many of the published articles are very close to Peter’s own interests, whereas while some of them are about quantitative text analysis and quantitative linguistics generally. Both areas were without any doubt the most focussed research areas in the last decades of his life. Karl-Heinz Best apologized for not contributing to this Gedenkschrift due to health reasons, but he expressed his deepest sympathy for Peter and his close relation to his works in quantitative linguistics. The publication of this memorial volume was financially supported by the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies of the University of Vienna, for which we would like to express our gratitude. We also have to acknowledge the professional and timely submission and resubmission of the articles and proofs by the authors. Many thanks also go to Jutta Altmann (RAM-Verlag) from the publishing house for the uncomplicated publication of the volume and to Daniel Ross for his thorough improvement of the English of articles written by non-native speakers. Vienna, Trier in autumn 2020 Emmerich Kelih & Reinhard Köhler