He was considered the sole representative of structural linguistics in America in Hungary.
In 1962, he was awarded a Ford Scholarship to the United States in the academic years of 1964–1965.
He left Hungary first for Germany then for the United States in 1985 when he was appointed to the head of the General Linguistics Department in ELTE in Budapest.
He was a professor in the Foreign Service Institute and an advisor at the Jamestown Foundation.
He spoke several languages, such as English, German, Russian, French, Albanian, Arabic, and Indonesian, fluently.