André-Georges Haudricourt

André-Georges Haudricourt (January 17th, 1911 - August 20th, 1996) was a French botanist, anthropologist and linguist.

André-Georges Haudricourt grew up on his parents’ farm, in a remote area of Picardy. From his early childhood he was curious about technology, plants, and languages. After he obtained his baccalauréat in 1928, his father advised him to enter the National Institute of Agriculture (Institut national agronomique), in the hope that he would obtain a prestigious position in the administration. But at graduation (1931), Haudricourt got the worst mark of the entire year group: unlike his peers, he was not interested in promoting modern tools and technology, but in understanding traditional technology, societies, and languages. He attended lectures in geography, phonetics, ethnology, and also in genetics in Paris. Marcel Mauss obtained funding for him to go to Leningrad for one year to pursue studies in genetics with Nikolai Vavilov, whose lectures he had attended with great interest at the National Institute of Agriculture.

In 1940, Haudricourt was awarded a position in the newly created Centre national de la recherche scientifique, in its Botany department, but he was disappointed by the research being done there, which relied on static classifications instead of an evolutionary approach espousing the new developments of genetics. In August 1940, the linguist Marcel Cohen entrusted to Haudricourt his library of books about linguistics before he joined the Résistance, as he was afraid the German occupation army may confiscate his library. This allowed Haudricourt to make extensive readings in linguistics during the Second World War. During the same period he also studied Asian languages at the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes.

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