Yakov Malkiel

Who was Yakov Malkiel?

Yakov Malkiel was a U.S. Romance etymologist and philologist. His specialty was the development of Latin words, roots, prefixes, and suffixes in modern Romance languages, particularly Spanish. He was the founder of the journal Romance Philology.

Malkiel was born in Kiev to a Russian-Jewish family, and was brought up and educated in Berlin, after the Russian Civil War. Despite an early interest in literature, he ended up studying linguistics at the Humboldt University of Berlin, then known as the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. Being a Jew in 1930s Germany was an obstacle to his education, but one he was able to overcome; his family finally emigrated to the United States in 1940.

After two years unemployed in New York, Malkiel accepted a one-term appointment at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. In 1943, he was offered an initially temporary position at the University of California, Berkeley, which later was converted to a permanent professorship; Malkiel remained there until his retirement in 1983, teaching in the departments of Spanish and Linguistics. He married fellow Berkeley professor María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, a philologist and literary critic from Argentina, in 1948.