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Terrence Scott Kaufman was born on June 12, 1937, in Portland, Oregon, and died on March 3, 2022. He earned his B.A. at the University of Chicago in 1959, began his decades-long fieldwork career in 1960, and earned his Ph.D. degree in 1963 at the University of California, Berkeley. His Ph.D. dissertation was a grammar of Tzeltal. He taught at The Ohio State University (1963-1964) and at Berkeley (1964-1970), and then spent the rest of his teaching career at the University of Pittsburgh (1971-2011). He was a valued mentor to the many students he trained at Pitt and in his MesoAmerican documentation projects, and a dear friend to many of the rest of us. As his old friend Lyle Campbell put it recently, Terry was truly "astonishing in the breadth and depth of his knowledge of seemingly everything, of his seemingly superhuman ability as a fieldworker, picking up instantly on the most subtle of things, getting more documentation done in a week's fieldwork on a language than most others could achieve in years of effort".

Terry was a dominant figure in MesoAmerican linguistics: he had first-hand fieldwork experience with more than thirty MesoAmerican languages; he co-founded and directed the Proyecto Lingüistico "Francisco Marroquín" (PLFM, 1970-1979), which trained native speakers of Indigenous languages of Guatemala in practical linguistics and oversaw the documentation of twelve Mayan languages; and he ran the Project for the Documentation of the Languages of MesoAmerica (PDLMA, 1994-2010), bringing linguists — undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars — together with native speakers of many Indigenous languages of Mexico. His main interest besides the documentation of underdescribed languages was historical linguistics, especially but by no means only the histories of Mayan, Mixe-Zoquean, Uto-Aztecan, Oto-Manguean, and Xincan languages of MesoAmerica. Outside this area, one of his most-cited publications is his 1990 article `Linguistic history in South America: what we know and how to know more'; this research was updated and his classifications extended in 1994 (in Moseley & Asher, eds., The Atlas of the world's languages) and 2007 (in the Atlas of the world's languages, 2nd edition). His other descriptive and historical interests included English, Romani, Siouan, Low Dutch, Hokan, Chibchan, and pidgin & creole languages. He is the only linguist I know of who has a section entitled 'Language Discoveries' on his CV: the section lists three Mayan languages, Teco (discovered in 1967), Sacapultec (1971), and Sipacapeno (1971). Another major interest, decipherment, was most prominently displayed in his work with John Justeson on Epi-Olmec hieroglyphic writing, including their cover story in Science (259:1703-1711, March 19, 1993). More recently he published Notes on the decipherment of Tartessian as Celtic (Journal of Indo-European Studies monograph #62, 2015).

Terry's interests ranged widely, and his research productivity was immense, but much, maybe most, of his work remained unpublished: it almost seemed as if he couldn't be bothered to follow through with publication once he had worked out a problem to his own satisfaction. When I became interested in Chinook Jargon, for instance, he lent me his huge box of grammatical analyses, lexicon, old correspondence with experts on the pidgin, and other materials; but his only publication on the language, as far as I know, was a four-page article in a volume on pidginization and creolization (Dell Hymes, ed., 1971). Luckily, his papers have been archived, most in The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America at the University of Texas, and the rest in the archives of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley.

I'll close on a personal note. Terry and I were colleagues and friends at the University of Pittsburgh for twenty-six years, collaborating on a number of projects: language contact (one conference paper, one article, and a 1988 book); a co-taught seminar on Indo-European linguistics; a long-running series of seventeen biennial Spring Workshops on Theory and Method in Linguistic Reconstruction (1986-2018); a joint 1983 appearance on West Virginia Public Television, where we tried (and probably failed) to convince the audience that no, carvings on a West Virginia cave wall were not the 6th-century Old Irish Ogham writing that the notorious linguistic pseudoscientist Barry Fell claimed they were; and many Linguistics Department parties, where Terry could usually be persuaded to give us his elegant rendition of the Frozen Logger song and where he always put the finishing touches on cooking the hottest pot of chili. I missed him when I left Pitt at the end of 1998 and afterward saw him only at our Reconstruction workshops; and now I'll miss him forever.

March 7, 2022 @ 6:33 am · Filed by Sally Thomason under Obituaries

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