Aurlien Sauvageot

Aurélien Sauvageot (1897–1988) was a French linguist specializing in Finno-Ugric languages. Born in Constantinople to an engineer serving the Ottoman Sultan, he began his academic career at the École Normale Supérieure in 1918, initially studying Germanic languages under Antoine Meillet. Meillet encouraged Sauvageot to focus on Finno-Ugric linguistics due to a vacant professorship after Robert Gauthiot’s death in World War I. In 1919, he traveled to Uppsala to study Finnish and later moved to Finland until October of that year.

In 1923, Sauvageot relocated to Hungary to teach French at the Eötvös József Collegium in Budapest, where he stayed until 1929. Upon returning to France, he completed his doctoral thesis on the lexicon of Uralo-Altaic languages and a complementary thesis on Gothic articles. In 1931, he became the inaugural professor of Finno-Ugric languages at the École française des Langues Orientales.

Sauvageot co-authored the first Hungarian-French and French-Hungarian dictionaries with József Balassa and Marcel Benedek in 1932 and 1937. He retired in 1967 but remained active in linguistic circles, contributing to the Société de Linguistique de Paris and the Cercle linguistique d'Aix-en-Provence until his death in 1988. His work includes publications on language structure and memoirs of his time in Hungary.