Avé-Lallemant, Friedrich Christian Benedict°

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AVÉ-LALLEMANT, FRIEDRICH CHRISTIAN BENEDICT°

AVÉ-LALLEMANT, FRIEDRICH CHRISTIAN BENEDICT ° (1809–1892), German criminologist and writer. Avé-Lallemant was a senior police official in Luebeck from 1843 to 1868 who studied the psychopathology of criminals and wrote novels about the underworld. In his studies of the language of the underworld, he had noted the large proportion of Yiddish words in the vocabulary, chiefly derived from Hebrew and Aramaic and therefore unintelligible to police and criminologists. He therefore included a translation and analysis of approximately 8,000 words and idiomatic expressions, an elucidation of 1,200 abbreviations, a basic Yiddish grammar, and illustrative texts. In 1889 the linguistic section was reprinted under the title Dolmetsch der Geheimsprache as a manual for court officials and was recommended for businessmen. The nonlinguistic sections were reprinted in 1914.

bibliography:

Rejzen, Leksikon, 1 (1926), 48–50; F. Avé-Lallemant, Das deutsche Gaunerthum (1914), v–xi (introd.); ndb, 1 (1953), 465; Algemeyne Entsiklopedye, 1 (1934), 175–6.

[Sol Liptzin]