Year: 1996
Type: article
Abstract: With the death at the age of 96 of Sir Harold Walter Bailey at Cambridge on n t h January 1996, the Society loses its own, and probably the nation's most outstanding Orientalist.A natural linguistic genius, his early steps in Classical and Eastern languages were substantially self-taught.Born at Devizes, Wiltshire, on 16th December 1899, he emigrated with his family to Australia at the age often, and spent his early years working on a farm at "Glen Wood", Nangeenan, near Merredin, 200 miles east of Perth.In Australia, where he left relatives, he was always remembered, and in Perth commemorated with an inscribed plaque in St. George's Terrace, among the State's 150 most distinguished citizens.Eventually he was to receive Honorary Doctorates of Literature from the University of Western Australia, and the Australian National University.Legendary tales are told how the chance acquisition at his boyhood home of books on language enabled him to gain a reading knowledge of French, German, Italian, Spanish,
Author: A. D. H. Bivar
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2092634818