Leslau, Wolf 1906-2006

OBITUARY NOTICE— See index for CA sketch: Born November 14, 1906, in Krzepice, Poland; died November 18, 2006, in Fullerton, CA. Linguist, educator, and author. A specialist in Semitic languages, Leslau was renowned for his work in recording disappearing tongues and dialects in Ethiopia. Eventually becoming fluent in seventeen languages, he attended the Sorbonne as a college student. Here he earned a degree in 1934; that year he also received a diploma from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. His Ph.D. from the Sorbonne would be earned later, in 1953. Remaining at the latter institution, he lectured in southern Arabic until 1939. Germany would soon invade France, and Leslau, a Polish Jew, was sent to a concentration camp. Good fortune came in 1942, however, when an international organization secured his release. Along with his wife, Leslau fled to New York City, where he taught Semitic studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes’ local campus. After World War II, he made what would be the first of numerous trips to Ethiopia while working for the Asia Institute. The African country had a number of Semitic communities, and Leslau set out to record their dying languages, such as the Gafat tongue. His dictionaries and grammar guides are the first written studies of many of these languages that belonged to tribes with oral traditions. He would win the Haile Selassie Award for Ethiopian Studies in 1965 for his work there. Leslau taught at Brandeis University in the early 1950s before moving to the University of California at Los Angeles in 1955. Here he was professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages and was founding chair of the university’s department of Near Eastern and African languages. He retired in 1976. Also the recipient of the Lidzbarski Gold Medal Award in 1996 from the International Oriental Societies, Leslau was the author of numerous scholarly texts. Among these are A Dictionary of Moca: Southwestern Ethiopia (1958), Harari (1965), Soddo (1968), Gurage Folkore: Ethiopian Folk Tales, Proverbs, Beliefs, and Riddles (1982), and Reference Grammar of Amharic (1995).

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Los Angeles Times, November 23, 2006, p. B9.