Winfred Philip Lehmann (June 23, 1916August 1, 2007) was an American linguist who specialized in historical, Germanic, and Indo-European linguistics. He was for many years a professor and head of departments for linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and served as president of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Modern Language Association. Lehmann was also a pioneer in machine translation. He lectured a large number of future scholars at Austin, and was the author of several influential works on linguistics. Early life and education Winfred P. Lehmann was born in Surprise, Nebraska on June 23, 1916, the son of the Lutheran minister Philipp Ludwig Lehmann and Elenore Friederike Grosnick. The family was German American and spoke German at home. They moved to Wisconsin while Lehmann was a boy. After graduating from high school, Lehmann studied German and classical philology at Northwestern College, where he received his BA in humanities in 1936. He subsequently enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. At Wisconsin, Lehmann specialized in phonetics and Indo-European and Germanic philology. He studied a variety of topics, including the works of John Milton and Homer, German literature, and became proficient in a diverse number of languages, including Old Church Slavonic, Lithuanian, Old Irish, Sanskrit and Old Persian. His command of languages would eventually extend to Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Turkish, and several branches of the Indo-European languages, including Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Hellenic, Anatolian and Indo-Iranian. Among his teachers at the University of Wisconsin were the Indo-Europeanist and Balticist Alfred E. Senn, Celticist Myles Dillon, Scandinavist Einar Haugen, and Morris Swadesh, William Freeman Twaddell and Roe-Merrill S. Heffner. Haugen's fieldwork among Scandinavian Americans would prove highly influential for Lehmann's later work on sociolinguistics. With Swadesh, Lehmann carried out studies on the Ho-Chunk people. Twaddell and Heffner were to have the strongest influence on him. He spent much time working with Heffner on phonetics, and the two co-wrote several articles on dialectology and sociophonetics for the journal American Speech, which are still of importance to scholars today. Lehmann gained his MA in 1938, and his PhD in 1941, both in Germanic linguistics at Wisconsin. His PhD thesis on verbs in Germanic languages was co-directed by Twaddell and Heffner. Early career From 1942 to 1946, Lehmann served in the Signal Corps of the United States Army. During World War II he was an instructor in Japanese for the United States