Lajos Ligeti was born in Balassagyarmat to a family of craftsmen on 28th of October, 1902. In 1921, he graduated with honors from the High School at Balassagyarmat. In the autumn of that year he began his education at the Latin, Greek and Turkish faculties of the Budapest University as a member of the Eötvös College. He began to study Oriental linguistics very soon, and at the university he could learn from such professors such as Zoltán Gombocz, Gyula Németh the Turkologist and the Slavist János Melich. Ligeti was greatly influenced by Zoltán Gombocz’s lectures on the Turkic loanwords in Hungarian. Even his first paper, published during his university studies was on the Chuvash topic (Deskó Endre csuvas-magyar nyelvhasonlítása, 1924).
In 1925 he received his doctorate with sub auspiciis (Turkish philology, Hungarian linguistics Far Eastern languages and literatures). In the fall of that year he went to the Sorbonne in Paris for three years to study from Jaques Bacot, Henri Maspero and Paul Pelliot. It was Pelliot who drew Ligeti’s attention to Mongolic language history and the Chinese sources on Inner Asia. It was Pelliot, from whom Ligeti learned the research method that he later used to be in the frontline of Oriental research. After he returned home, what he learned in Paris set in the service of his primary aim, that was the research of Hungarian prehistory.
In addition to the knowledge that can be drawn from books, Ligeti also considered as important the knowledge of original sources, the spoken languages of the area and the local circumstances. This made him return from Paris to apply for a scholarship for a Mongolian research trip to study the Old Mongolian language and literature on the spot. He set out to Inner Mongolia, China in 1928, and spent three years there. In the midst of internal warfare and banditry, he visited several lama monasteries, studied Buddhist Mongolian literature and previously practically unknown archaic Mongol dialects. During his stay, he reviewed the vast canonical text collection of Mongolian Buddhism, the Kanjur, the catalogue of which was published by him in 1944 (Catalogue du Kanjur mongol imprimé, Vol. 1). “I did this job with particularly great enthusiasm, since exactly a hundred years before, a similar job was prepared in Tibet, also for the first time, also by a Hungarian: Sándor Kőrösi Csoma,” he wrote in an autobiography of him. He published his results and travel experiences in two books; one for the scientific world (Rapport préliminaire…, 1933) and the other for the general audience (Sárga istenek, sárga emberek, 1934). He brought over a hundred Mongolian manuscripts and prints from his journey, which he donated to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
He undertook two more research trips to the East. Between 1936 and 1937, he traveled to Persia and Afghanistan to discover Mongolian archaic languages. He brought Persian and Arabic manuscripts from Persia, including a photograph of Ibn Fadlan’s work, which is so important for the study of Hungarian prehistory. In Afghanistan he collected linguistic material of the Moghol language believed to be extinct by that time, and he gained linguistic material of different Turkic dialects. Numerous scholarly articles resulted from this trip, and also a book for the broader readership. (Afgán földön).
The last time he did a longer research trip in the East was in 1940. This time he went to Japan. In Tokyo and Kyoto, he studied the Inner Asian material, primarily Japanese-language publications unknown in Europe. He has compiled a valuable collection about the Mongolian, Jurchen, Tibetan and other manuscripts kept in Japanese libraries.
He considered the knowledge on Inner Asia essential for the study Hungarian prehistory. In his article A magyarság keleti kapcsolatai published in 1932, he wrote: “Although today it is getting increasingly doubtful that Hungarians have ever lived in Asia, or even if they lived their stay there has not been long or significant, it is certain that the peoples with which they lived with in Eastern Europe mostly came from Central Asia, and that the lifestyle and culture they had been involved with for centuries is also largely of Asian origin. In order to understand and evaluate Eastern Europe and thus our prehistory, we must first and foremost know the piece of land that is in many respects the source here: Central Asia and its history, largely up tothe 10th–11th century.”
A few years later he undertook the task to share his knowledge with the interested Hungarian readers. In his book Az ismeretlen Belső-Ázsia (1940), he talked in a scholarly but readable way about the history of expeditions to Central Asia, the historical and religious picture that can be drawn from the sources discovered there, and he did not fail to draw the relationship between Hungarian prehistory and the Inner Asian region.
Ligeti therefore considered it essential for the knowledge of Hungarian prehistory to extend the research to the Central Asian area and to establish the institutional framework for such a research.
Returning back from his research trip to Mongolia, he became an assistant lecturer and from 1932 he was appointed as a private lecturer at the University at Budapest. From 1934 to 1935 he was invited as a lecturer to teach Mongolian philology for two semesters to students of the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris. The French expected him to continue his career there, so he was offered a position at the university in Paris and French citizenship. Although he knew he was depriving himself of a great scientific opportunity, he refused the offer. In 1936, when he was only 34 years old, he was elected as a correspondent member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. From 1939 he taught History of Inner Asia and Mongolic studies as an extraordinary professor, then from 1941 as a full professor at the University of Budapest. From 1942 he also taught Tibetan at the department created for him: the Department of Inner Asian Studies. In 1942, due to lack of specialists, the Faculty of Humanities temporarily commissioned him as the head of the Department of East Asian studies, and to teach East Asian subjects (Chinese, Manchu, Korean) for the future Sinologists. Finally, he performed this task unpaid for twenty years. After the retirement of Gyula Németh, he became the head of the Department of Turkish Philology for many years (1965-1971).
He considered to be an important task to provide a possibility of publication for the Orientalists. From 1938, by the mandate of the Kőrösi Csoma Society he edited the series Bibliotheca Orientalis Hungarica, and in 1950, the Academy’s journal of Oriental Studies, the Acta Orientalia Hungarica was started under his editorship. In 1966 the monograph series Kőrösi Csoma Kiskönyvtár started. On his initiative was launched in 1973 the publishing of the scientific journal Keletkutatás in Hungarian.
In 1947 he was elected as a regular member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and from 1949 he became the vice-president of the Academy. He bore this position for 21 years. Under his guidance the Oriental Committee was created, and in 1969 he re-organized the Kőrösi Csoma Society.
Next to his Inner Asian Department, he created the Community of Altaic Studies (later research group) of the Academy, in the workings of which he was involved even after his retirement in 1972.
Ligeti played an important role in founding the Department of Altaic Studies in 1974 at the József Attila University of Szeged. By donating his private library, he created conditions for education and research in Szeged.
By the internations scholarly world Ligeti primarily considered a Mongolist. Most of his publications in foreign languages have been published on this topic.
Beside of the research on Ancient Mongolic languages (e.g. the language of Tabgach and Kitan) and their indirect sources, like the Tungusic language Jurchen, which preserved several Kitan loanwords, Ligeti paid serious attention the problems of Middle Mongol and Preclassical Mongol languages. In the 14 volumes of the series Mongol Nyelvemléktár, together with his pupils, he published several linguistic monuments dating from the 13th–16th centuries. These volumes in a corrected and elarged form were published with French prefaces and explanations in the series Monumenta Linguae Mongolicae Collecta. The series Indices Verborum Linguae Mongolicae Monumentis Traditorum starting in 1970 worked up the lexical material of these monuments. These volumes were published to serve as a base for a future Middle Mongol and Preclassical Mongol dictionary and grammar. As the first volume of the Monumenta the text of the Secret History of the Mongols was published, a Mongol chronicle preserved in Chinese transcription, the Hungarian translation of which also connects to name of Ligeti. This brilliant translation presenting the life of Genghis Khan, and the creation of the Mongol Empire was published in 1962.
From the history of Chinese language Ligeti was most interested in the “barbarian” glosses in Chinese transcription. That was due to the fact, that Chinese sources preserved early linguistic material of languges spoken around China from a period when these people did not yet had a literacy (e.g. Kínai átírásos barbár nyelvi glosszák, 1941; Egy karluk törzs neve kínai átírásban, 1949; Mots de civilisation de Haute Asie en transcription chinoise, 1950)
His Turkological interest also was diversified. In several of his studies he dealt with various issues of Turkic historical phonetics, including the discovery of original Turkic long vowels (A török hosszú magánhangzók, 1938; Les voyelles longues en turc, 1938). He processed the Sino-Turkic linguistic monuments of the 15th-16th centuries (Un vocabulaire sino-ouigour des Ming, 1966; Documents sino-ouigour du Bureau des Traducteurs, 1967, 1968; Glossaire supplémentaire au Vocabulaire sino-ouigour…, 1969). He was interested in the Uyghur Buddhist texts (pl. Notes sur le colophon du “Yitikän sudur”, 1954; Autour du Säkiz yükmäk yaruq, 1971), he dealt with the Turkic language of the Afshars in Afghanistan (Sur la langue des Afchars d’Afghanistan, 1957), devoted several articles to the language of the Cumans (e.g Sur deux mots comans, 1962; Prolegomena to the Codex Cumanicus, 1981; A Codex Cumanicus mai kérdései, 1985).
His Turkological interest, however, focused on researching the Old Turkic loanwords of the Hungarian language. His Hungarian language-related Turkological papers were published in two volumes in 1977 and 1979 (A magyar nyelv török kapcsolatai és ami körülöttük van), followed by a summary of his whole-life research in 1986: A magyar nyelv török kapcsolatai a honfoglalás előtt és az Árpád-korban. In this large-scale work, he examined the Turkic loanwords from both Tukological and Hungarian linguistic point of view, and came to a number of important conclusions concerning Hungarian prehistory.
In recognition of his scientific work, Ligeti was elected as a member of several scholarly organizations (Permanent International Committee of Mongolists, Ulanbator, Turkish Society of Language, Société Asiatique, Royal Asiatic Society, American-Oriental Society, Finno-Ugrian Society, Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaft, corresponding Member of the Institut de France, Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres). He was awarded the Kossuth Prize in 1949 and later several other state awards. In 1967 he was awarded the Academic Gold Medal and in 1968 the Indiana University Altaistic Gold Medal.
He became a Honorary Doctor in 1982 the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and in 1984 at the József Attila University in Szeged.
He passed away on the 24th of May, 1987 at Budapest.
