Lajos Bese

Lajos Bese (1926–1988) was a Hungarian linguist and orientalist specializing in Altaic studies, Mongolian linguistics, and Manchu philology. Born in Békéscsaba, he graduated from Budapest's Eötvös Loránd University with a degree in Mongolian-Manchu linguistics (1951) and defended his candidate's dissertation on prefixes in Mongolian in 1965. Until 1958 he bore the surname Ligeti, which he changed to "Bese" — a Buryat negative particle — in order to distinguish himself from the prominent orientalist Lajos Ligeti, the change serving at the same time as a gesture of protest of sorts. In the 1950s he was barred from academic work for political reasons and spent several years as an unskilled laborer and bricklayer at various Budapest enterprises. From 1958 he was a member of staff at the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which he headed from 1961 to 1976; in 1974–1975 he was a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. His principal scholarly contributions lie in the study of Middle Mongolian verbal conjugation, the dialectology of the northern Mongolian languages (particularly Buryat and Khalkha), and Turkic-Mongolian linguistic contacts; he also investigated Mongolian folklore and folk beliefs, making several research expeditions to Mongolia and the Soviet Union. His comprehensive monograph on Mongolian and Turkic personal names of the thirteenth century remained in manuscript.