Beke (Berger) Ödön

* Komárom, 20 May 1883 – † Budapest, 10 April 1964 / linguist, ; university professor, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences ; ; He began his secondary education at the Komárom gymnasium and completed his secondary education at the Reformed Gymnasium in Pápa. He obtained a doctorate in humanities from the Budapest University of Science and Technology in 1905, which he supplemented with a Hungarian-Latin teaching diploma in 1906. He began his teaching career in Budapest, and in 1909 he also spent a year in Sibiu. In 1910–1919, he taught at a gymnasium in Budapest, then received a university chair during the Soviet Republic and taught Finno-Ugric linguistics. After the fall of the communist dictatorship, he was removed from his position, at which time Ödön Beke emigrated to Vienna, from where he returned to Budapest in 1923. From 1926 to 1947 he taught at the Jewish High School. In 1948 he obtained a private teacher's qualification at the Pázmány Péter University of Budapest (later ELTE). From 1949 he lectured on Volga and Permian linguistics at the Finno-Ugric Department as a public extraordinary teacher. From 1953 to 1962 he was a professor at the department. He began his scientific career with dialect research, collecting folk tales, riddles and folk songs. His most significant achievements are related to the descriptive research of the Mari language, and the sound history, morphology and syntax of Finno-Ugric languages. ; Based on his own collection, he published several collections of Mari folk poetry and vernacular texts containing vast material, but he also dealt in depth with the folk customs of the Mari. His Mari dialect dictionary, which was prepared for publication, was several thousand pages long – along with numerous other Cheremis dialect texts – but remained in manuscript, and was believed to be lost for a while, and these unique corpuses of texts were only published three decades after his death (1995–2001). Beke's scientific interests were not limited to the Mari language and folklore, but he also dealt with Udmurt and Lapp folk poetry, folk beliefs, and the comparative study of Mari and Chuvash folk tales. József Pápay (1873–1931) compiled a Northern Khanty dictionary from his collection of folk poetry (1959). He was also interested in etymology, primarily researching the origins of Hungarian plant and animal names. ; ; His main works: ; A pápavidéki nyelvjárás, 1905, ; A vogul adverbs, 1905, ; The language of Kemenesalja, 1906, ; Tseremisz grammar, 1911, ; Finno-Ugric adverbial structures, 1914, ; Tscheremisische Texte zur Religion und Tscheremisische Märchen, Sagen und Erzählungen¸1938, ; Vocabulary and folk tradition, 1948, ; The folk poetry and customs of the Tscheremiszek (Marik), 1951, ; New research on Finno-Ugric morphology, 1954, ; Mari dialect dictionary, 1997.