Wolf Leslau

Wolf Leslau was undoubtedly the greatest Semiticist linguist of the past century—many would even say of all time.¹ He was born in Czestochowa, Poland, on November 14, 1906, and died in Fullerton, California, on November 18, 2006. The centenarian was working almost up to his final day on a descriptive grammar of the Ethio-Semitic language Gogot. As with so much of his work, his grammars were based on material he had collected doing fieldwork, in this particular case many decades before. He published more than fifty volumes and more than two hundred articles in a variety of international journals over a long and distinguished career of seventy-plus years, and he is known as a most prodigious contributor to Ethiopian linguistics (including three enormous projects of particular importance, Leslau 1979, 1987, 1995) as well as an important contributor to Semitic comparative and historical lexicography, and folklore and oral literature. His publications (written chiefly in English, but also in French, Yiddish, and Hebrew) ranged across descriptive grammar, comparative grammar, lexicography, grammatical/phonological and lexical reconstruction, etymology, language classification, borrowing, anthropological and cultural linguistic topics (e.g. folktales, argots, riddles, songs, proverbs, taboos), translation, bibliography, reviews, and even recordings of Ethiopian traditional music.

Leslau moved to Vienna in 1926 with the grand sum of the equivalent of ten US dollars in his pockets, and graduated in 1929 with an A.B. in Semitic languages from the University of Vienna, where he studied under Viktor Christian and Wilhelm Czermak; he also took a diploma that same year from Vienna’s Hebräisches Pädagogium. It was also in Vienna that he met and married his wife Charlotte, with whom he had two daughters. After relocating to Paris in 1931, Leslau continued his linguistic studies at the Sorbonne and the École Nationale des Langues Orientales. He received his Licence-es-Lettres in 1934 from the Sorbonne, from which he would also earn his Docteur-es-Lettres (D. Lit.) in 1953. He also earned a diploma from the École des Hautes Études with the publication of his dissertation (Leslau 1938). His teacher and mentor in Paris was Marcel Cohen, one of the most prolific linguists of the twentieth century, and he studied as well with Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes, George Colin, William Marçais, and René Labat.

After having taught in Paris for several years, Leslau was arrested by the French police and interned in a camp for foreigners upon the outbreak of World War II. The winter of 1939–40 in the internment camp in the Pyrenees was particularly harsh, due to the severe cold with no fires or hot water available. In 1941, he was transferred to the Camp des Milles, near Aix-en-Provence, an area not controlled by the Germans. Miraculously, days before the camp was taken over by the Nazis, Leslau escaped with his wife and baby daughter with the assistance of an international rescue organization, and arrived in the United States in 1942. Along with other European refugees, Leslau soon began teaching in New York at the École Libre des Hautes Études, the Asia Institute, and the New School for Social Research. He accepted a professorship at Brandeis University in 1951, and in 1954, he served as Visiting Professor at the University College of Addis Ababa.

The following year, already having accumulated fifteen years of teaching experience, he began his long and distinguished tenure as Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Linguistics at UCLA, which remained his home institution until his death. He was founding Chair of the Department of Near Eastern and African Languages (now Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) and served as its first Chairman from 1959–65, and he again chaired the Department from 1974–76. He also played a key role in the establishment of the federally funded UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies (now called the Gustave E. Von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies, named after a distinguished Islamist colleague whom he first met during his student days in Vienna, and whom he also joined at the Asia Institute). Among his most noteworthy activities at UCLA, Leslau directed several Amharic-language programs for the...