Leland Yeager's Facility With Languages

利蘭·耶格爾

As David Gordon notes, Leland Yeager passed away on Monday.

Alex Tabarrok reports:

His facility with languages was legendary:

Another doctoral student, the president of the Graduate Economics Club, was working with Yeager (in Yeager’s capacity as Director of Graduate Studies) to bring Maurice Allais to the University of Virginia for a colloquium. Yeager passed any correspondence from Aliáis on to the club’s president for a response. The correspondence was in French.

Nonplussed by what he mistakenly considered Yeager’s challenge to him, the club’s president decided to retaliate. With the aid of a graduate student in another department, he responded to Yeager with a letter written in Sanskrit. Yeager was oblivious to the ruse. Innocently, he replied in Sanskrit, saying how pleased he was that the club’s president knew this language.

-Robert Wenzel