WALTER BELARDI (1923-2008)
Walter Belardi, born in Rome on 22 March 1923, studied Iranistics and general linguistics under Antonino Pagliaro at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome from 1942 to 1946, supplementing the courses at this university with those (Avestic and Pahlavi) taught by Giuseppe Messina, a pupil of J. Markwart and his successor, after 1928, at the Pontifical Biblical Institute (the names of the two ‘Iranistic masters’ appear together on the dedication page of Studi mithraici e mazdei). He graduated in 1946 under the tutorship of Antonino Pagliaro with a thesis on IndoEuropean morphology; he immediately became an assistant lecturer in glottology at the Istituto Universitario Orientale, where he taught as full professor starting in 1956; in the early 1960s he was called by Pagliaro to Rome where he continued the latter’s teaching at the Institute of Glottology and directed the specialist School of glottology. At the Orientale he also taught Armenian from 1961 to 1969, a course later taken over by Giorgio R. Cardona, who had graduated under his direction with a thesis on the Armenian and Syriac religious lexicon, with a view to establishing this specialization at the Orientale (which however for various reasons could not be continued). The works of his pupils, who hold glottological courses at the Sapienza (Giorgio R. Cardona, Palmira Cipriano, Paolo Di Giovine, Claudia Ciancaglini) and two of whom had premature deaths, as well as those of Marco Mancini, another of his pupils who established a substantial nucleus of glottology and linguistics at La Tuscia University of Viterbo, continued several of the Iranistic interests of their teacher in the field of both historical linguistics and of the study of linguistic contact. After working in the 1950s as editorial secretary in Pagliaro’s periodical, Ricerche linguistiche (which closed after number 6, in 1974), Belardi set up and directed at the Orientale the linguistic section of Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale (AION-L: i, 1959-ix, 1970), in which he published, among others, Iranistic articles by H.W. Bailey, F.B.J. Kuiper, M. Mayrhofer, A.J. van Windenkens, L. Zgusta, E. Hamp, O. Szemerényi, W. Wüst, V.I. Abaev, J. Duchesne-Guillemin, G. Dumézil, W.B. Henning, D. Weber. In the Quaderni series (second Quaderno, Naples 1963), which paralleled the periodical, he also published A Vocabulary of Marw Baluchi by Josef Elfenbein, which marked the beginning of Italian and Neapolitan interests (initially through the work of Alessandro Bausani) in the Balochi language. Starting in 1974 Belardi promoted the series ‘Biblioteca di ricerche linguistiche e filologiche’, published by the Institute of Glottology of the University of Rome (later by the Department of Glottoanthropological Studies, and then by the Rome publisher ‘Il Calamo’), now at its 62nd issue and interrupted with the unanimous consent of his students at the death of its founder, which has published articles on Indian, Iranian, Germanic, Slavonic, Armenian, Illyrian, Latin, Greek, Italic, Etruscan and Romance linguistics. In Belardi’s youthful publications of the period immediately before and after his university teaching qualification of 1951, his (already substantial) Iranistic skills were mainly applied (a) to languages representing the documentation of the ancient phases (Avestan and
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