Landau, Alfred
LANDAU, ALFRED
LANDAU, ALFRED (1850–1935), Yiddish linguist and folklorist. Born in Brody (Galicia), at age 15 he moved to Vienna, where he later studied law and received a doctorate in jurisprudence (1887) before practicing law for 12 years. His main intellectual interest, however, was Yiddish linguistic research, to which he devoted all his energies after abandoning the practice of law. A perfectionist, Landau was never satisfied with the quality of his achievements and therefore published relatively few of his many penetrating studies. Prominent among his published works are his study of the diminutive in Galician Yiddish (in Deutsche Mundarten (1897), 46–58); his study of the language of Die Memoiren Glückels von Hameln (in mgjv, 7 (1901), 20–68); the glossary of the collection of various private Yiddish letters dating from 1619, which he published jointly with B. *Wachstein (1911); his research on the Slavic influence in Yiddish (in Filologishe Shriftn [yivo], 2 (1928), 198–214). Landau's lifework, however, was to have been a Yiddish-German etymological dictionary; the invaluable material he had already collected and studied was lost together with other treasures of the *yivo in Vilna. On the occasion of his 75th birthday, yivo published a Yiddish festschrift, Landoy-Bukh (Filologishe Shriftn, 1 (1925), 1–22), where a bibliography of Landau's published works as well as his biography and genealogy are to be found.
bibliography:
Rejzen, Leksikon, 2 (1929), 58–61; lnyl, 4 (1961), 427–9. add. bibliography: Kh. Gininger, in: yivo-bleter, 12 (1937), 396–409.
[Mordkhe Schaechter]