Language Log

Back on September 15, when I posted the news of Fred Jelinek's death, I promised to say more when I'd had a chance to think about it. Then, a few days later, Robert Dale asked me to write an obituary for Fred to be published in the Computational Linguistics journal. The December 2010 issue is now out, and Fred's obituary is here.

Following Robert's suggestion, I aimed at a broad assessment of Fred's impact on the field, since CL recently published Fred's own detailed account of his professional life ("The Dawn of Statistical ASR and MT", CL 35(4):483-494 , 2009).

Following on the announcement of the death of my dear friend Ellen Prince (here), I'm now passing on three further death announcements from recent days: sociolinguist Faye Vaughn-Cooke and lexicographers Fred Mish and Sol Steinmetz.

A note from the Penn Linguistics Department, written by Gillian Sankoff and Tony Kroch:

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our colleague Ellen F. Prince. Ellen died peacefully at home in Philadelphia on Sunday, October 24, after a long battle with cancer.

On October 1, Partha Niyogi died of brain cancer at the age of 43.  He was Louis Block Professor in Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Chicago, and on his web page, he tells us that

My research interests are generally in the field of artificial intelligence and specifically in pattern recognition and machine learning problems that arise in the computational study of human speech and language.

On September 30, 2010, a journalistic genre passed away: the mock obituary marking the purported demise of a linguistic phenomenon. According to the coroner's report, the cause of death was rampant overuse.

I can understand why Margalit Fox would want to give such prominence to Edwin Newman's two books on usage in her New York Times obituary for for the journalist, who died recently at 91. Newman retired from NBC more than 25 years ago, and people who remember him are likely to be hazier on his journalism than on his 1970's bestsellers Strictly Speaking and A Civil Tongue, which are still in print (though only in large type and audio editions appropriate to a public of advancing diopter). But I wish they had left me out of it.

Jason Eisner just forwarded to me this note from Nick Jones, the dean of the Engineering School at Johns Hopkins:

It is with great sadness that I am writing to share with you the news that a member of the Whiting School community, Fred Jelinek, passed away last night.

Today's New York Times has an obituary for James J. Kilpatrick ("James J. Kilpatrick, Conservative Voice, Dies at 89", by Richard Goldstein) that focuses, as the headline promises, on Kilpatrick's career as a conservative voice in newspaper columns, books, and television appearances. In passing, Goldstein mentions Kilpatrick's (often decidedly peevish) career as a critic of grammar, usage, and stye:

Mr. Kilpatrick railed against turgid prose in "The Writer's Art" (Andrews, McMeel and Parker, 1984). In his "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine, William Safire wrote that Mr. Kilpatrick's essays on "the vagaries of style are classics."

I just learned that Gösta Bruce died last week.

His 1977 dissertation Swedish Word Accents in Sentence Perspective was one of those works that seems to open up a whole new intellectual continent for exploration — when I first read it, I immediately felt that "it smells of horizons", as my grandfather used to say.

Martin Gardner has died at the age of 95.

His interest in language included unusual skill in manipulating the use-mention distinction, as in this spectacular example:

One that's less impressive, but a little easier to process:

Q: What 11-letter word do all Yale graduates spell incorrectly?

Kwala is no more. Kwala, the dog Mark taught to sing, the dog who ate exams, died this morning, aged fifteen. In addition to Mark's musical collaboration with her, Kwala has a claim to Language Log mention for another reason: in her young and vigorous days, she accompanied me to my Intro to Language class when the topic was animal language (or animal "language"). I ordered, ROLL OVER! And she rolled over. I ordered, BOWL SNOVER! And she rolled over. I ordered, SNIG BLIVVER! And she rolled over. Finally a clever student pointed out that the intonation was the same on all three utterances, and she could've been going by that (since she obviously wasn't responding to the actual words in the utterance). He may well have been right; or maybe it was just that she refused to learn any other tricks. She was smart: she was the only dog I've ever had, for instance, who would consistently backtrack around a pole when she was on the leash and we found ourselves on opposite sides of the pole; but she always considered it beneath her dignity to do tricks, no matter how many treats she got for doing them.

Manfred Schroeder died on Dec. 28, 2009, as I just learned.  He was a physicist specializing in acoustics, who worked at Bell Labs from 1954 to 1969, and then split his time between Göttingen and Bell Labs.  He carried forward the tradition of Harvey Fletcher, an accomplished physicist whose most important work was in the psychology of hearing. As Manfred jokingly pointed out to me when we first met in 1975, this is also the tradition of  Gleb Vikentyevich Nerzhin, the mathematician in Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle who seals his fate by chosing to work on psycho-acoustics rather than cryptography.

When Sally announced the sad news of Dell Hymes' recent death, she thanked him for his generosity and personal kindness to her. Thanking is a speech act that we all should use more often.