Language Log

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

Vi Hilbert, a fluent speaker of Lushootseed, the native language of the Puget Sound area, known for her dedication to her language and culture, passed away Friday. She taught courses in Lushootseed at the University of Washington, founded Lushootseed Research, and wrote extensively. Her work includes: Lushootseed Texts, Lushootseed Dictionary, and Haboo: Native American Stories from Puget Sound. She was the recipient of a Festschrift: Writings About Vi Hilbert, By Her Friends.