Career
He was considered the sole representative of structural linguistics in America in Hungary. He was a lone wolf in Hungarian linguistics. In 1962 he was awarded a Ford Scholarship to the United States in the academic years of 1964-1965.
He was a Visiting Professor in Berlin between 1981 & 1986.
He left Hungary first for Germany then for the United States of America in 1985 when he was appointed to the Head of the General Linguistics Department in Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He settled in Manassas, Virginia.
He was a Professor in the Foreign Service Institute and an advisor at the Jamestown Foundation. He died of a heart attack in 1993.
He spoke several languages, such as English, German, Russian, French, Albanian, Arabic, and Indonesian, fluently.