Gerard Leslie Makins Clauson

Who was Gerard Leslie Makins Clauson?

Sir Gerard Leslie Makins Clauson was an English civil servant, businessman, and Orientalist best known for his studies of the Turkish language.

Clauson attended Eton College, where he was Captain of School, and where, at age 15 or 16, he published a critical edition of a short Pali text, "A New Kammavācā" in the Journal of the Pali Text Society. In 1906, when his father was named Chief Secretary for Cyprus, he taught himself Turkish to complement his school Greek. He studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in classics, receiving his degree in Greats, then became Boden Scholar in Sanskrit, 1911; Hall-Houghtman Syriac Prizeman, 1913; and James Mew Arabic Scholar, 1920. During World War I, he fought in the battle of Gallipoli but spent the majority of his effort in signals intelligence concerned with German and Ottoman army codes.

These were the years in which the great Central Asian expeditions of Sven Hedin, Sir Aurel Stein, etc. were unearthing new texts in a variety of languages including Tokharian, Khotanese, and Tumshuqese. Clauson actively engaged in unraveling their philologies, as well as Chinese Buddhist texts in the Tibetan script.

Clauson also worked on the Tangut language, and in 1937–1938 wrote a Skeleton dictionary of the Hsi-hsia language. This dictionary was never published, but a manuscript copy is held at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.