Karl Heinrich Menges

Karl Heinrich Menges (April 22, 1908 – September 20, 1999) was a German linguist known for his advocacy of the Altaic hypothesis. He was a faculty member at Columbia University in New York and subsequently at the University of Vienna.

Biography Menges was born in Frankfurt, where he was educated at the Lessing Gymnasium. He studied at the University of Frankfurt am Main and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and earned his doctorate at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin in 1932. Politically identifying as a Catholic centrist, he resisted the Nazi regime, distributing leaflets. In 1936, he was arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated for five hours; on a tip-off from a classmate, after being released pending trial he fled to Czechoslovakia, after the annexation of the Sudetenland moving on to Turkey. Over his career, he taught at a total of 13 institutions in seven countries.

At the age of 19, Menges was one of the first Westerners to visit the Volga region and the Caucasus within the Soviet Union. He published numerous articles and 15 books; His articles, as well as his teaching, were characteristically interdisciplinary, and in addition to Altaic, he made important contributions to Slavic, Turkic, Tungusic, and Dravidian language studies. A complete thematically organized index of his publications appeared in 2006.