Background
Mr. Herman was born in New York, United States, on March 2, 1925.
Mr. Herman was born in New York, United States, on March 2, 1925.
Louis Herman discovered his aptitude for languages at Friends Seminary, a Quaker high school in his native Manhattan. He later received intensive linguistic training at Cornell and was an Army interpreter in Europe in World War II; he did not seem to know how to stop acquiring languages.
He kept on learning them during his years at New York University, while earning a master's degree at the Columbia School of Journalism, while working as an associate editor at The New Leader and even after becoming a translator at the United Nations. By the time he finished, he had mastered more than 25 languages.
After studying languages at Cornell University, Mr. Herman served as a translator for the U.S. Army during World War II. In 1958 he became a translator for the United Nations. Almost two decades later, Louis Herman’s work, A Dictionary of Slavic Word Families, was published. After his retirement from the U.N., Louis Herman penned more than 850 letters to the editors of the New York Times, 123 of which were published, most noting language errors in the paper.
Mr. Herman was married. He had a stepdaughter, Melinda Weller, and a stepson, Felton Weller.