Leonard Bloomfield, 1887-1949. Leonard Bloomfield was born in Chicago to immigrants to the United States from Austria-Hungary. He entered Harvard in 1903, finishing his degree in 3 years. At 19, with his Harvard A.B. in hand, he began graduate work in German studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he served as a teaching assistant. Here he met the linguist Eduard Prokosch, then a young instructor, and almost immediately determined to become a linguist. After two years of work at Wisconsin, he went to the University of Chicago to continue his studies in comparative-historical linguistics and Germanics. He also studied Sanskrit; his uncle was Maurice Bloomfield, a well-known professor of Sanskrit and comparative linguistics, from whom he possibly derived some of his interest.