Vladimir Orel

Vladimir Orel was born in 1952 in Moscow

Vladimir Orel was born in Moscow on 9 February 1952. He studied theoretical and structural linguistics at Moscow State University.

In 1981 he earned his Ph.D. with a thesis on the Slavic languages of the Balkans. He then worked at the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies in Moscow, where he completed a second doctorate on the historical grammar of Albanian in 1989.

After moving to Israel, he taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then at Tel Aviv University from 1992 to 1997. He also did biblical studies at the Shalom Hartman Institute and spent his last years in Israel at Bar-Ilan University.

He later moved to Calgary, Canada, and taught at several universities in Alberta. From 2005 he ran the Translation Center at the Calgary Regional Health Authority. He died on 5 August 2007.

His work covered Slavic, Balkan, Germanic and Albanian languages, as well as Biblical Hebrew and Afroasiatic languages. His Hamito-Semitic Etymological Dictionary, written with Olga Stolbova, drew serious criticism from specialists.