Wolf Leslau, 1906-2006

Wolf Leslau, UCLA Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Semitic Linguistics, and a well known and highly respected scholar of Ethiopia passed away on November 18, 2006 at the age of 100. Leslau was already a renowned scholar in his field when he joined UCLA in 1955. He became the founding Chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages (later renamed Near Eastern Languages and Cultures), and was instrumental in establishing the Center for Near Eastern Studies.

Born in Poland on November 14, 1906, and educated at the University of Vienna and at the Sorbonne in Paris, Professor Leslau studied Hebrew, Aramaïc, Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian), modern South Arabian, Ethiopic, and several other languages. He did extensive fieldwork in Ethiopia, off and on, from 1946 to 1976, and he published about fifty books and hundreds of articles, most of them on the Semitic languages of Ethiopia. In the 1960s Prof. Leslau developed an Amharic textbook that was used to train Peace Corps volunteers before their service in Ethiopia (UCLA's Peace Corps training program taught Amharic to 1,500 members during a three-year period).

Some of the languages that Professor Leslau worked with had little or no written text when he began his research. For these, he used innovative methods to record texts for linguistic study, and to document the cultural life of the people in their own words, and from their own perspective. Each book in his Ethiopians Speak series presents a phonetic transcription in a particular language (Harari, Chaha, Soddo, Muher and Chaha-Ennemor), with literal English translation preserving the language structure, as well as a conventional English translation. He designed the series to inform both linguists and social scientists in Ethiopian studies. In the case of Gafat, Wolf Leslau's timely intervention recorded details of this language that was on the verge of extinction. Leslau had first studied Gafat from a copy of the Song of Songs in Amharic with Gafat translation, located at Oxford University's Bodleian Library. He subsequently scouted out four surviving Gafat speakers in Ethiopia with whom he was able to collaborate as informants to document and to further study the language.

In addition to various prestigious research fellowships, including two Güggenheim awards, he received both local and international recognition for his unique scholarship. He was named UCLA Faculty Research Lecturer in 1965 and was honored with three festschriften by professional colleagues in 1981, 1991 and 1996. He was the recipient of the Haile Sellassie Award for Ethiopian Studies in 1965, the Medal of the Order of the Blue Nile-First Class in 1983, and the Mark Lidzbarski Medal in 1996. Since 2000, Wolf Leslau has published an average of one major scholarly work per year, including concise dictionary of  Amharic & English, Introductory Grammar of Amharic (2000), The Verb in Mäsqan as Compared with Other Gurage Dialects (2004), and others forthcoming. Wolf Leslau was an extraordinary and well respected scholar to the very end. He will be sorely missed