Leonard Robert Palmer (1906-1984) was a British linguist, important both for his own work and as an editor. Early in his career he taught Classics at the Victoria University of Manchester, became Chair of Greek at King’s College London, and from 1952 was Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford. In the late 1950s he was President of the Philological Society. He invited Georges Dumézil to give lectures in London in 1951, and the resulting book, Les Dieux des indo-européens, was dedicated to Palmer. One lecture of Dumézil’s Déesses latines et mythes védiques was based on a lecture Palmer invited him to give in Oxford in May 1956, where Palmer also brought Émile Benveniste in 1964.
Palmer was known for his books including Descriptive and Comparative Linguistics in 1972, and The Interpretation of Mycenaean Greek Texts. He attended the 1956 conference outside Paris on Mycenaean studies I’ve discussed before – “Benveniste, Dumézil, Lejeune and the decipherment of Linear B”. This interest led him into archaeology, and debates about the dating of the Knossos site in Crete (see Mycenaeans and Minoans). He is also significant as an editor of two book series. One was entitled “The Great Languages”, in which his own studies of Greek and Latin were published, along with studies of most modern Western European languages, Russian and Slavonic, Chinese and Sanskrit. Anna Morpurgo Davies edited the series in later years, and co-edited Palmer’s Festschrift – Studies in Greek, Italic and Indo-European Linguistics offered to Leonard R. Palmer… Some of the names I’ve been discussing in relation to my wider project were contributors, including Françoise Bader, Harold Bailey, Ilya Gershevitch, Jerzy Kuryłowicz, Michel Lejeune, Manu Leumann, Rüdiger Schmitt, and Calvert Watkins.
The other series Palmer edited was called “Studies in General Linguistics”. The initial series description appeared on the back-cover flap of David Abercrombie’s English Phonetic Texts, the second book in the series:
Professor L.R. Palmer, editor of the ‘Great Languages’ series, is preparing this new series of books on Linguistics. Elements of General Linguistics by André Martinet is the first volume in the series, and it is hoped that Professor Palmer’s own Introduction to Modern Linguistics will be added to the series at a later date. Other volumes will be concerned with Phonetics and Comparative Linguistics, and other related subjects.
The series is designed for the growing number of students of linguistics.
The books were published by Faber & Faber in London and often jointly appeared with an American publisher, usually a university press. Palmer said his Descriptive and Comparative Linguistics was a replacement for his 1936 book An Introduction to Modern Linguistics, noting in the revision that “a simple reissue was unthinkable” given the developments of the intervening years (p. 9).
As well as the translation of Martinet’s Elements of General Linguistics in 1964, the “Studies in General Linguistics” series also published the English version of Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society in 1973. (This translation was recently republished as Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society by Hau books). Indo-European Language and Society was published in the USA by University of Miami Press, listing it as number 12 of their “Miami Linguistics Series”. Benveniste’s Problems in General Linguistics had appeared in that series as number 8. The University of Miami Press printing has that publisher embossed on the cover, but inside appeared to have simply rebound the Faber & Faber printing, including that publisher name on the title page. L.R. Palmer wrote a brief preface to the Martinet translation and originally proposed translating Benveniste’s Indo-European Language and Society himself.
The translator of Martinet is Elisabeth Palmer (with an ‘s’), while Elizabeth Palmer (with a ‘z’) translated Benveniste. Leonard Palmer does a ‘thanks for typing’ acknowledgement to his wife in Descriptive and Comparative Linguistics (p. 11), and thanks her for her “experience of scientific drawing” in The Interpretation of Mycenaean Greek Texts (p. ix). But on neither occasion does he give her name. However, The Greek Language is dedicated “To Elisabeth” (an ‘s’, again, p. v) and his acknowledgements note that this dedicatee is his wife (p. xii).
It seems probable that Elisabeth and Elizabeth are the same person. But could there really be a spelling mistake in a translator name, especially if it was the name of the series editor’s wife? One obituary of Leonard Palmer mentions his wife was Austrian, and a medical scholar. Being Austrian would further support the ‘Elisabeth’ spelling, as do the reprints of Martinet, Éléments de linguistique générale with University of Chicago Press and Midway. Given ‘Elisabeth’ appears in Martinet’s translation (1964), and the dedication (1980), the spelling in the translation of Benveniste (1973) seems to be the anomaly. (Until I found the dedication, I did wonder if she’d anglicised the spelling at some point.) But if it was a misprint, would it not be corrected in later printings? Palmer is a common surname, so it can be hard to find details. Some of the identities in library catalogues have merged the names. There are other books by ‘Elizabeth Palmer’ which seem unlikely to be the same person. There is also an Élisabeth Palmer, who was married to the Swedish-born French gynaecologist Raoul Palmer, who also published with him.
Giulio C. Lepschy co-edited the “Studies in General Linguistics” series with Leonard Palmer in the 1970s, and his A Survey of Structural Linguistics, a revision of a text originally published in Italian, appeared in it in 1970. Unless I am missing books, the series was therefore uneven in chronology: two books in 1964 (Martinet and Abercrombie), and three in the early 1970s (Lepschy, Palmer, Benveniste). But the Martinet and Benveniste translations are interesting in themselves as a minor link between French and anglophone post-war linguistics and some of the names involved.
[Update 13 March 2026: Felicity Callard has shared the news of Giulio Lepschy’s recent death, and his obituary from the University of Reading. 11 April 2026: there is also an obituary in The Guardian.]
References
David Abercrombie, English Phonetic Texts, London: Faber & Faber, 1964.
Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971.
Émile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des insitutions indo-européenes, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, two volumes, 1969; Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer, Coral Gables: University of Miami Press/London: Faber & Faber, 1973; reprinted as Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer, Chicago: HAU books, 2016.
Georges Dumézil, Les Dieux des indo-européens, Paris: PUF, 1952.
Georges Dumézil, Déesses latines et mythes védiques, Bruxelles: Latomus, 1956.
Guilio C. Lepschy, A Survey of Structural Linguistics, London: Faber & Faber, 1970.
André Martinet, Éléments de linguistique générale, Paris: Armand Colin, 1960; Elements of General Linguistics, trans. Elisabeth Palmer, London: Faber & Faber/Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
Anna Morpurgo Davies and Wolfgang Meid (eds.), Studies in Greek, Italic and Indo-European Linguistics: Offered to Leonard R. Palmer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, June 5, 1976, Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, 1976.
L.R. Palmer, An Introduction to Modern Linguistics, London: Macmillan & Co., 1936.
L.R. Palmer, The Latin Language, London: Faber & Faber/Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954.
Leonard Palmer, The Interpretation of Mycenaean Greek Texts, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.
Leonard R. Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans: Aegean Prehistory in the Light of the Linear B Tablets, London: Faber & Faber, 2nd edition, 1965 [1961].
Leonard R. Palmer, Descriptive and Comparative Linguistics: A Critical Introduction, London: Faber & Faber/New York: Crane, Russak & Company, Inc., 1972.
Leonard R. Palmer, The Greek Language, London: Faber & Faber, 1980.
This is the twenty-sixth post of a weekly series, where I post short essays with some indications of further reading and sources, but which are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare ideas, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome.
The full list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here.
