Eleanor Harz Jorden
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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.