Gyula Decsy

* Quarter, March 19, 1925 – † Bloomington/USA, December 30, 2008 / linguist, university professor ; ; He started elementary school in his native village, and graduated from the Érsekújvár high school in 1943. For four years at the high school, linguist Béla Kálmán was his Hungarian teacher, while Endre Kovács, who later became known as a historian, taught Slovak. He began his university studies in the fall of 1943 at the Pest University of Technology, majoring in mechanical engineering, then studied economics for a few months, and finally became a student of Hungarian-history at the Pázmány Péter University in early 1944. He studied in Bratislava in 1946–1947, and then finished university in Budapest, after he and his family were resettled in Hungary in 1947. In 1948, he earned a doctorate in humanities from the University of Budapest (title of his dissertation: The main directions of Slovak social and national development). He began his scientific career at the Institute of Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, at that time he primarily dealt with Slavic languages, but later became known as a researcher of Finno-Ugric languages. ; After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he fled to the West. After a short stay in Austria, he ended up in Germany. In 1957–1959, he was a Hungarian lecturer at the University of Göttingen. From 1959, he was a private tutor of Finno-Ugric linguistics at the University of Hamburg, from 1965, a full professor, and from 1969–1977, director of the Finno-Ugric Seminar. From 1977, he was head of the Department of Ural-Altaic Studies (later: Department of Central Eurasian Studies) at Indiana University in Bloomington. Since 1958 he has been co-editor and since 1967 editor of the Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher published in Germany. His Hungarian writings have mainly appeared in Új Látóhatár and Katolikus Szemle. In Bloomington, he published a tundra Nenets chrestomathy (collection of quotations) as early as 1966. Later, he primarily dealt with linguistic reconstruction and the linguistic image of Europe. ; ; His main works: ; Der Münchener Kodex I-II. (1958, 1966), Die ungarischen Lehnwörter der bulgarischen Sprache, 1958, ; Einführung in die finnisch-ugrische Sprachwissenschaft, 1965, ; Yurak Chrestomathy, Developmental Work on Material in West Sibirian Language, 1966, ; Die linguistische Struktur Europas. Vergangenheit, Gegenwart, Zukunft, 1973, Sprachherkunftsforschung I–II. (1977, 1981), Global; Linguistic Connection, 1983.