Uriel Weinreich

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Uriel Weinreich (1926 – 1967) was a world famous linguist at Columbia University. Born in Vilnius (then part of Poland and now capital of Lithuania), he earned his Ph.D. from Columbia, and went on to teach there, specializing in Yiddish studies, sociolinguistics, and dialectology. He advocated the increased acceptance of semantics, and edited one of the most influential Yiddish-English dictionaries.

Weinreich was the son of the linguist Max Weinreich, and the mentor of both Marvin Herzog, with whom he laid the groundwork for LCAAJ, and William Labov. Weinreich is also credited with being the first linguist to recognize the phenomenon of interlanguage 19 years before Larry Selinker coined the term in his 1972 article "Interlanguage". In his benchmark book Languages in Contact, Weinreich first noted that learners of second languages consider linguistic forms from their first language equal to forms in the target language. However, the essential inequality of these forms leads to speech which the native speakers of the target language consider inequal. He died of cancer prior to the publication of his Yiddish-English dictionary.

[edit] Publications

College Yiddish: An Introduction to the Yiddish Language and to Jewish Life and Culture (YIVO, New York, 1st edition 1949, 6th edition 1999), ISBN 0-914512-26-9.
Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems. New York, 1953. Reprint, Mouton, The Hague, 1963, ISBN 90-279-2689-1.
Say It In Yiddish: A Phrase Book for Travelers (with Beatrice Weinreich). Dover, New York, 1958, ISBN 0-486-20815-X.
Modern english-yidish yidish-english verterbukh. Modern English-Yiddish English-Yiddish Dictionary (Schocken, new paperback edition 1987), ISBN 0-8052-0575-6.