Michael L. Chyet

Michael Lewisohn Chyet (born 1957) is an American linguist and librarian.

Early life and education

He grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father, Stanley Chyet, was a reform rabbi and "a prominent scholar and professor of American Jewish history, translator of Hebrew literature, [and] poet." The family accompanied him on a sabbatical year in Jerusalem when Chyet was 13. He received his Ph.D. in Mideast languages and folklore from the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation was titled "'And a Thornbush Sprang Up Between Them:' Studies of Mem û Zin, a Kurdish Romance."

Career

He is a cataloguer of Middle Eastern languages at the Library of Congress, having initially joined the Library in fiscal year 2000 as a contract cataloger for Arabic. As of fiscal year 2011, he was responsible for cataloging in "Kurdish; plus Arabic, Persian, Turkish." Formerly, as of 1996, he was senior editor of the Kurdish Service of the Voice of America, where he worked until moving to the Library of Congress. An expanded edition in two volumes (and with a third English-Kurdish volume) was published in 2020. While the first edition used only the Latin alphabet, the second edition also employed the Arabic alphabet.