Mordkhe Veynger

Mordkhe Veynger, more infrequently known as Mikhail Borisovich Veynger, was a Russian and Soviet linguist. An ethnic Jew, he specialised in the study of the Yiddish language.
Born in Poltava, Russian Empire, his family moved to Warsaw when he was a child, where he studied Germanic philology at the Imperial University of Warsaw. After World War I he established himself at Minsk where he became lecturer at the Belarusian State University.
He began the first Yiddish dialect atlas, Yidisher shprakhatlas fun Sovetn-farband, in the 1920s. The atlas is limited to phonology and to Yiddish spoken within the contemporary territory of the early Soviet Union. The latter is seen as a major drawback, because it did not include populous Mideastern Yiddish.
Veynger committed suicide on February 4, 1929, allegedly over a failed love affair.