Karl Heinrich Menges (April 22, 1908 – September 20, 1999) was a Germanlinguist known for his advocacy of theAltaic hypothesis. He was a faculty member atColumbia University inNew York and subsequently at theUniversity of Vienna.
Menges was born inFrankfurt, where he was educated at theLessing Gymnasium. He studied inFrankfurt andMunich and earned his doctorate at theUniversity of Berlin in 1932.[1] Politically identifying as aCatholic centrist, he resisted theNazi regime, distributing leaflets. In 1936 he was arrested by theGestapo and interrogated for five hours; on a tip-off from a classmate, after being released pending trial he fled toCzechoslovakia, after the annexation of theSudetenland moving on toTurkey.[1]
Menges taught atColumbia University in New York for 36 years, from 1940 to 1976. He had been invited to teachSlavic languages; the university discovered only after his arrival that he was a scholar of the then little-studiedAltaic languages.[1] After his retirement from Columbia he taught at theUniversity of Vienna until shortly before his death inVienna at the age of 91.[1][2] Over his career, he taught at a total of 13 institutions in seven countries.[3]
At the age of 19, Menges was one of the firstWesterners to visit theVolga region and theCaucasus within theSoviet Union.[2] He was quoted variously as saying he spoke between 24 and "over 50" languages, and said that when he came to theUnited States he was the only person in the country who could speakUzbek.[1] He won aGuggenheim Fellowship in 1972.[4] He published numerous articles and 15 books;[1] a revised edition of hisThe Turkic Languages and Peoples, first published in 1968, appeared in 1995.[5] His articles, as well as his teaching, were characteristically interdisciplinary, and in addition to Altaic, he made important contributions to Slavic,Turkic,Tungusic, andDravidian language studies.[3] A complete thematically organized index of his publications appeared in 2006.
