Gerard Clauson

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Sir Gerard Leslie Makins Clauson (born April 28, 1891 - May 1, 1973 ) was a British orientalist (especially Turkish and Mongolian languages) and diplomat.

Clauson attended Eton College and published an essay on the Pali language while still a student (1906). His father John Eugene Clauson (1866–1918) was High Commissioner for Cyprus and Clauson therefore learned Turkish in self-study. He studied classical philology at Corpus Christi College in Oxford and also Sanskrit, Syriac and Arabic, for which he received university awards. During the First World War he took part in the battle of Gallipoli as an infantry officer and was involved in the military secret service (stationed in Iraq and Egypt) in deciphering the military codes of the Turks and the Axis powers . In the 1920s he was involved in evaluating the findings of the expeditions to the Silk Road by Aurel Stein and others, for example in the translation of Buddhist texts into Tibetan script. He wrote an unpublished extensive dictionary of the Hsi-Hsia language (Tangut), the manuscript of which is in the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and published a dictionary of the early Turkish language.

From 1919 he was in the diplomatic service and was Assistant Under-Secretary of State in the Colonial Office from 1940 until his retirement in 1951. During this time he could only pursue his studies in his spare time. In 1932 he played a leading role in the Imperial Economic Conference in Ottawa. In 1947 he chaired an international wheat conference and in 1951 a rubber conference. Then he went into the private sector and devoted himself to scientific work. 1960 to 1969 he was Chairman of Pirelli in Great Britain.

He was considered a leading British Turkologist alongside E. Denison Ross and had close contacts with researchers in Hungary, Finland, Poland and Russia. He was president of the Royal Asiatic Society and received its gold medal in 1973. In 1969 he received the Indiana University Prize and was active in the Permanent International Altaistic Conference.

For his work in World War I he received the OBE and the Croix de Guerre with palm trees.

Fonts

  • Studies in Turkic and Mongolic Linguistics, Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. 1962, Reprint: Routledge 2002
  • The future of Tangut (Hsi Hsia) Studies, Asia Major (New Series), Volume 11, 1964, pp. 54-77.
  • An Etymological Dictionary of pre-thirteenth-century Turkish, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1972

literature

  • CE Bosworth , Brian Porter, JD Latham, obituary in Bulletin British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 1, 1974, No. 1, pp. 39-43, first page
  • I. Galambos: Sir Gerard Clauson and his Skeleton Tangut Dictionary. Central Asiatic Journal 2015, abstract

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 1974 is also often given as the year of death, according to the obituary by Bosworth, et al. a. Bulletin British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 1, 1974, Issue 1, p. 39, he died in 1973
personal data
SURNAME Clauson, Gerard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Clauson, Gerard Leslie Makins
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British orientalist and diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH April 28, 1891
DATE OF DEATH May 1st 1973