Émile Benveniste
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Emile Benveniste (1902–1976) was born in Aleppo (today in Syria) into a Sephardic Jewish family. In his early childhood, he moved with his family to Paris, where he entered the French Rabbinical School, and later, in his teens, enrolled at the Sorbonne to study classical languages, Celtic, Indian and Indo-European linguistics, attending courses of F. de Saussure, A. Meillet, J. Vendryes, J. Bloch and S. Lévi. At the age of twenty-five, Benveniste became director of studies in Indo-European comparative grammar and Iranian at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In the subsequent period he turned into a widely appraised specialist in both domains, extending his interest as well to mythology and history of religion and culture. Among his monographs in the fields of Iranian and Indo-European may be mentioned those on Sogdian grammar (1929a), Persian religion (1929b), the formation of nouns in Indo-European (1935a), the infinitive in Avestan (1935b), magi in old Iran (1938), Ossetic (1959), agent nouns and action nouns in Indo-European (1948), Hittite (1962) and aristocratic titles and proper names in Old Iranian (1966b).