Yakov Malkiel

With the death of Yakov Malkiel on Apr 24, 1998 at age 83, an era in Romance philology came to an end. Malkiel was one of the last survivors of that group of refugee scholars who, fleeing National Socialist Germany, came to the US and helped change their chosen disciplines by skillfully combining their solid, tradition-based factual training received in the leading universities of Central Europe with the methodological and theoretical advances introduced by more experimentally inclined New World practitioners of general linguistics.