Tytus Benni

Intelligentsia; a son of Herman and Olga Matylda née Moes.

He attended middle schools in Dorpat, Warsaw and Halle. He studied in Leipzig, earned his doctoral degree in Fribourg (1905). He did his habilitation in general phonetics (with research conducted at a laboratory in Hamburg) at Jagiellonian University (1914).

After graduating, he worked as a supervising teacher at schools in Stara Wieś and Klarysew, and later in Warsaw. From 1916, he took active part in the shaping of the school system, focusing on foreign language teaching and teaching deaf and mute persons. In 1920, he set up and ran the State Phonetics Institute which provided training to teachers of deaf and mute children. He also gave lectures on phonetics at the State Special Education Institute. In 1920, he was made phonetics professor at Warsaw University, he started lecturing six years later. In 1930, he became the vice president of the International Society of Experimental Phonetics, and a year later began running the Phonetics Institute at Warsaw University. He laid the groundwork for the study of Polish phonetics.

• Katarzyna Bryzek, Tytus Benni – twórca podstaw fonetyki polskiej i kodyfikator ortofonii (rozważania nie tylko rocznicowe), „Poradnik Językowy” 1975, nr 9, s. 469–484.
• Stanisław Słoński, Ś.p. Tytus Benni (1877–1935), „Rocznik Towarzystwa Naukowego Warszawskiego” 1935, nr 28, s. 95–97.
• Andrzej Śródka, Benni Tytus Justus, [w:] Biogramy uczonych polskich, red. A. Śródka, t. 1, Warszawa 1994, s. 104–105.