Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner
Anglo-Hungarian orientalist
Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner (14 October 1840 – 22 March 1899), also known as G.W. Leitner, was a Hungarian-born British orientalist and the first principal of Government College, Lahore.
Early life and education
Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner was born in Pest, Hungary, on 14 October 1840 to a Jewish family. His mother was Marie Henriette Herzberg. His father, Leopold Saphir, died when Gottlieb was young and his mother then married Johann Moritz Leitner. Gottlieb and his sister Elisabeth (the mother of British politician Leopold Amery) were thereafter known as Leitner.
As a child, Leitner showed an extraordinary ability in languages. At the age of eight he went to Constantinople to learn Arabic and Turkish, and by the age of ten he was fluent in Turkish, Arabic and most European languages. At fifteen, he was appointed Interpreter (First Class) to the British Commissariat in the Crimea, with the rank of colonel. When the Crimean War ended, he wanted to become a priest and went to study at King's College London.
It is also reported that during his tour of Muslim countries he adopted a Muslim name of Abdur Rasheed Sayyah.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.