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Michael passed away at the age of 77 on May 26, 2025 in Kapa'a, Hawai'i, but I just learned of this great loss two days ago.  Since we usually corresponded about two to three times a month, when I hadn't heard from Michael for several months, I suspected that he was having health problems.

Michael was born on June 2, 1947 in Palo Alto, California to Dr. Edward and Ruth Carr. Michael grew up in Overland Park, Kansas, graduating from Shawnee Mission West High School. He completed his undergraduate work at The University of Colorado and The University of Kansas. Michael married the love of his life, Terry Reardon, in 1972 after meeting on a blind date, and thereafter the two never spent a single day apart. 

Michael served in the Peace Corps after university and eventually earned a Ph.D. in Oriental Studies in 1979 from the University of Arizona. He served faithfully on the faculty in the Center for Language Studies at Otaru University of Commerce, Hokkaido, Japan for 20 years. There, he and Terry fell deeper in love with Japan and its people, language, and culture. I visited Michael and Terry at Otaru when the snow was up to the eaves of their house.  Later, after he retired, I stayed with them on Kauai, Hawai'i for a few days.  What a difference that was!

Fluent in Japanese, Chinese, and Hawaiian, Michael published extensively on Chinese and Japanese linguistics and lexicography during his career and well after his retirement in 1997. He was associate editor and a leading contributor of the huge (more than two thousand pages) NTC New Japanese-English Character Dictionary (1990). 

Michael spent his retirement in Kauai as a freelance translator and generously volunteered his expertise to Wikipedia, writing hundreds of scholarly articles, long and short, on linguistics and other related fields.  Here I must emphasize what an enormous contribution Michael made to scholarship through his Wikipedia articles on Chinese lexicography, Daoism, shamanism, Japanese language and culture, and many other subjects, all written anonymously.  He would work on each of the longer articles for months, and, when they came out, specialists on all of these subjects would wonder who was responsible for them. Not only did Michael write hundreds of superlative articles, he also worked hard to maintain standards across the whole Wikipedia enterprise, never revealing his identity.  Michael strove diligently to keep contentious politics and vandalism out of Wikipedia, and spent enormous amounts of time and energy on basic questions, such as whether we should write "Taoism" or "Daoism".  Because of his commitment and reasoning, he swayed me (and most others) to switch from the former to the latter.

Before retirement, Michael had already established a public reputation as a respected lexicographer and Sinologist.  I know one of his virtuoso articles up close because he published it in Sino-Platonic Papers.  That was his paper on "Tiao-Fish through Chinese Dictionaries", SPP, 40 (September, 1993), 68 pp.  In it, Michael exhaustively described a tiny fish from antiquity:

    The tiáo < ·d'ieu < *d'iôg fish, a classical Chinese happiness metaphor, has been contradictorily identified as a chub, culter, dace, eel, goby, hairtail, hemiculter, loach, mullet, paddlefish, and pike. This paper illustrates the history of Chinese lexicography by comparing tiáo definitions from thirty-five Chinese monolingual dictionaries with tiáo translation equivalents from sixteen Japanese and seventeen Western language bilingual ones. 

…

The present monograph on Chinese dictionaries started as a translation study of Zhuangzi's epistemological dialogue about whether humans can know the "happiness of fish" (see §I.2). English translators have rendered the Chinese joyful tiáo < *d'iôg B as "minnow," "thryssas" (i.e., anchovy), "herring," "trout," "silver carp," "small fish," "white fish," and simply "fish." Checking monolingual and bilingual dictionaries revealed even further disagreements about the tiáo's identity, and it became apparent that this fish provides a good case study of problems in Chinese linguistics and lexicography.

[VHM:  B There are many different sinographic forms of this morpheme.  Here I'm using the form printed in 17.13 of the Chinese Text Project edition of the Zhuang Zi. Scores of other forms are carefully written out by hand in the list of Figures at the back of this paper.]

[VHM:  My recollection from when I was working on this problem more than three decades ago, is that I came to the conclusion that this little tiao fish in the Zhuang Zi was a "hemiculter", popularly known as a "minnow".]

This kind of meticulous, zoological, lexicographical research continued the work pattern Michael established in his doctoral dissertation:

Carr, Michael. 1979. "A Linguistic Study of the Flora and Fauna Sections of the Erh-ya." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona. UMI 7920598.

For a brief article on the Erya (3rd c. BC), the first surviving Chinese dictionary, see here, which includes an explanation of its name by South Coblin.

The entries for Michael Carr in the bibliography of the tiao-fish monograph list a few other Sinological papers by him, including one about "*Vicious Hair".  When I first glanced at that expression, I thought it was a wild mangling of my own name.            

Michael was an active board member with the Julian Jaynes Society. Thoughtful and generous, Michael (usually wearing one of his trademark yellow T-shirts, often a tank top suitable for the warm weather of Kauai) enjoyed time with friends in Kauai and family members visiting from the mainland. He loved the outdoors, whether working in his garden, biking, or kayaking. Michael is survived by his devoted wife Terry, his elder sister Mindy Reeves of Fresno, his niece Rebecca (Reeves) Pope of Clovis, California, and his nephew Scott Reeves of Sacramento.

[Thanks to Rebecca and Jay Pope]

September 12, 2025 @ 2:20 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Lexicon and lexicography, Obituaries

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