Language Log

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 choosing 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.

I just heard that Dell Hymes died peacefully in his sleep last Friday (13 November 2009).    Linguists, anthropologists, and folklorists will all mourn his passing.  According to the grapevine, there will be a memorial gathering to remember him at the upcoming American Anthropological Association meeting in Philadelphia (specifically: Saturday, December 5, 7:30-9:30 P.M., in Grand Ballroom III at the Courtyard Marriott).  Dell's many scholarly accomplishments will be praised by others, people who know his work much better than I do; I have mostly admired his work from a distance, although I've often consulted his 1955 dissertation, The Language of the Kathlamet Chinook,  in my efforts to understand the structure of  the Northwest pidgin language Chinook Jargon.   But I have always been most grateful to Dell for the role he played in my own career — I'm reasonably sure that I would not have gotten tenure, all those years ago, if he had not written such a detailed and generous letter about my few and flimsy publications.

In this Sunday's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine (already available online here), I take a look back at the legacy of the column's founder, William Safire. As I write there, "Safire's acute awareness of the limits of his own expertise was often lost on fans and critics alike." Indeed, the "language maven" title that he liked to use was intended to be self-deprecating. (Some might say "self-depreciating," but let's not open that can of worms.)

Part of that self-awareness was a willingness to acknowledge his errors in judgment. In that spirit, I follow up the "On Language" tribute with my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, taking a look at one of Safire's early miscues: declaring, in 1979, that could care less was a "vogue phrase" on its way to extinction. Thirty years later, the verdict is: not so much. Fortunately, Safire didn't often confuse his language mavenry with futurology.

William Safire has passed away, and it is no small measure of his impact that even linguabloggers who were most critical of his "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine (Languagehat, Mr. Verb, Wishydig) have been quick to post their sincere condolences. Grant Barrett has written about his generosity of spirit, and I too was touched by his personal kindness.

I'll be posting a longer remembrance tomorrow in my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, but for now I'd like to note one example where Safire, despite his occasional prescriptivist predilections, showed a willingness to heed the work of descriptive linguists. In a 2006 column, he described political "template phrases" such as "No X left behind" and "We are all X now." At the time, I was disappointed that he was unfamiliar with the work of Language Loggers on snowclones. But earlier this year, when Safire approached me for my thoughts on the expression "I don't do X," I nudged him to an appreciation of snowclones, and of Language Log. He followed up the column with another one ("Abbreve That Template") explicitly acknowledging Language Log's pioneering work in snowclonology. Even at the end of his prolific career, he was eager to learn something new.

[Update, 9/28: My Word Routes remembrance is here.]

I’m sad to report that phonologist Nick Clements passed away in Chatham, Massachusetts, on August 30. There is an obituary by Beth Hume on LINGUIST List. Beth co-organized a symposium on tones and features in honor of Nick in June; the speaker list was a veritable who’s who of phonology, of which Nick was also of course a prominent member. He will be missed.

Via the Society for Caribbean Linguistics comes news of the passing of the great linguist and lexicographer Richard Allsopp. He died on June 4 in Barbados at the age of 86. A native of Guyana, Allsopp made signal contributions to the study of Caribbean creoles. He is perhaps best known as the editor of the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (1996), a monumental lexicographical project more than 25 years in the making.

You can read more about Allsopp's life in Starbroek News and the Barbados Advocate.

Obituary in the New York Times, Monday 11 May:

Venetia Phair Dies at 90; as a Girl, She Named Pluto

She died on 30 April at her home in Banstead, Surrey.

Eric Bakovic reports that an obituary for Yuki Kuroda "will soon appear on LINGUIST List, but it is already on our department website along with some remembrances (still being updated), a bibliography, and other things": here.

I read the headline

William J. Jorden, Reporter and Envoy, Dies at 85

(NYT, 28 February, p. A20) and paused a moment: why was this name so familiar?

Then, later in the obit, came

Mr. Jorden's first marriage, to Eleanor Harz, a professor of Japanese at Cornell University and elsewhere, ended in divorce.

Ah! Eleanor Harz Jorden, author of the very influential textbooks Reading Japanese and Japanese: The Spoken Language (and a member of the Linguistic Society of America). And there she was in a photo (with her husband and son) from 1956.

Sadly, it turns out that she too died recently, on 11 February (William J. Jorden died on 20 February). A brief obituary (reprinted from the Cornell Chronicle), citing her as "a linguist and world leader in language pedagogy and language teacher training", appeared yesterday on the Linguist List.

With great sadness I report the death, on the 25th, of Yuki (Sige-Yuki, Shige-Yuki) Kuroda of the University of California at San Diego. His department is preparing an obituary, which I will link to when it becomes available. Here I report only my personal sense of loss: Yuki and I went to graduate school together (along with my Stanford colleagues Paul Kiparsky and Stanley Peters), and we were friends ever since. Yuki was a formidable linguist, and also one of the world's nicest people.

Mickey Noonan, of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, who died a few days ago, is movingly memorialized by Carol Genetti in a posting originally to the Linguistic Typology mailing list and now available on-line via the Linguist List, here.

My old friend and comrade-in-arms, John DeFrancis, died at the age of 97 on January 2, 2009. The cause of his death was a bizarre, tragic accident, yet one that is supremely ironic for someone who devoted his entire adult life to the study, teaching, and explication of Chinese language: John choked on a piece of Peking Duck at a Christmas dinner in a Honolulu restaurant.

John with some of the books he published, in 1996 by John DeFrancis