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In Memoriam
Ladislav Zgusta
On Friday, 27 April 2007, our colleague, mentor, and good friend Ladislav Zgusta passed away. He is survived by his wife, Olga, and two children, and his passing is a great loss to all of us at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1924 he survived two dictatorships, the Nazis and the Communists. Immediately after the collapse of the "Prague Spring" he made daring, cloak-and-dagger escape with his family, via India, to the United States, where he joined the University of Illinois soon after as member of the faculty in Linguistics and the Classics. In 1986 he was appointed Director of the University's prestigious Center for Advanced Study.
Professor Zgusta earned three doctor's degrees. The first one in Classical Philology and Indology from Prague University (1949), the second in the Philology of Ancient Asia Minor from the Prague Academy (1964), and a third "Dr. Habil" degree in Indo-European linguistics from the University of Brno (1964). The three dissertation topics give only a limited indication of the breadth of his work. He published eight books and monographs, edited or co-edited at least another nine monographs, and produced more than 140 papers and article, and more than 570 reviews, on a wide range of topics, including Indo-European and general historical and comparative linguistics, synchronic linguistics, typology, onomastics, and perhaps most important, lexicography. His Manual of Lexicography, published in 1971 by Mouton, is still a standard in the field.
His contributions have been widely recognized. He served as Collitz Professor at the 1976 Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America. He held Guggenheim fellowships in 1977 and 1983. He was an honorary member of the American Name Society, a fellow of the Dictionary Society of North America, and member of the executive board of the Indogermanische Gesellschaft. He became a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Science in 1982 and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992. Perhaps the personally most significant recognition was his being awarded the Gold Medal of the Czech Academy of Sciences for his work in Humanities in 1992.
Most important, Ladislav Zgusta was a great colleague and friend, known for his loyalty to the Department of Linguistics and his marvelous sense of humor.
A comprehensive bibliography of Professor's Zgusta writing, up to 1994, can be found in these two publications:
Hock, Hans Henrich (ed.) 1997. Historical, Indo-European, and lexicographical studies: A festschrift for Ladislav Zgusta on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter Kachru, Braj B., and Henry Kahane (eds.) 1995. Cultures, Ideologies and the Dictionary: Studies in Honor of Ladislav Zgusta. (Lexicographica: Series Maior.) Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
See also:
Ladislav Zgusta. Lexicography Then and Now: Selected Essays. Edited by Frederic S. F. Dolezal and Thomas B. I. Creamer. (Lexicographica Series Maior.) Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006.
And: http://www.cas.uiuc.edu/othereventpics/zgustaencom.pdf
Tony Traill
Tony Traill, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 68, was a Wits University linguist and world-renowned expert on Bushman/San languages.
Modest and unassuming, he would have been loath to describe himself as an expert on the Bushmen themselves, but from the age of 30 they were his passion. He journeyed into the Kalahari at least four times a year to be with them, listen to them, talk to them, record their language and their stories.
Linguists who know his work have called him the greatest field phonetician of the 20th century.
Traill was born in Johannesburg on February 27 1939 and went to King Edward VII High School in Houghton.
He had a strong rebellious streak, perhaps because his father was a teacher; he was a member of a motorbike gang and got into all sorts of trouble. Eventually he was caught stealing a car and given lashes.
Thanks to the efforts of a retired lawyer and old boy of the school who defended him, he managed to avoid a criminal record.
Having already fallen in love with the Zulu language, he went to Wits to study African languages, found that he had a perfect ear and became fluent in Zulu and almost fluent in Sotho. His lecturer was Pan Africanist Congress leader Robert Sobukwe, who he revered and to whom he dedicated his PhD. He also went to Zambia to study Lozi, which he learnt to speak fluently. While there he was baptised in the Zambezi, at a leper mission on the river, into the Plymouth Brethren, although subsequently he rejected religion altogether.
He was a young lecturer in the Linguistics Department at Wits when a professor from the medical school came to see him. This man, Professor Hans-Joachim Heinz, had done some work in the Kalahari and produced a dictionary on the !Xoo language, but it was rejected by the publishers.
He thought Traill might like to have a look at it. He did and was fascinated. He rushed off to Lone Tree Panin the Kalahari with Heinz and a tape recorder and was instantly hooked, not only on the phonetics of the language but on the Bushmen themselves. He was captivated by their spontaneity, lack of subservience, sense of fun and bawdy sense of humour, which he shared.
He became fluent in !Xoo, one of the most difficult languages for outsiders to learn, and in the mid-'90s published the first !Xoo-English dictionary.
His work brought him to the attention of Laurens van der Post, who Traill helped with his book, Testament to the Bushmen.
Van der Post promoted himself as a world authority on the Bushmen but Traill thought he overromanticised and mythologised them. When Van der Post said he looked into the Bushmen's eyes and saw 20000 years of history, Traill retorted that when he looked into Bushmen's eyes he saw Klipdrift brandy.
Once he listened to Van der Post narrating a television programme on Bushmen trance dances. As one of the dancers in the throes of a trance threw sand over himself, Van der Post intoned solemnly that he was getting in touch with the fundamental cosmos.
"Rubbish," snorted Traill. "I know that Bushman. He's just saying, 'I'm hot, I'm hot'. He explained that when Bushmen went into a trance they got very hot and threw sand over themselves to cool down.
Once, when his extraordinary ability to make a particular guttural sound flummoxed linguists at Edinburgh University, he had X-rays taken of his throat and pictures taken inside it with a special camera to work out where the sound was being articulated.
These revealed a lump on his larynx, which he thought was cancer. Back in Johannesburg he took a couple of Bushmen to a private clinic where the same procedures were performed on them. They also had the lump, which was diagnosed as a kind of callus that had formed as a result of making the guttural sounds of their language. Tests on Bushmen children showed no sign of this lump.
The eminent anatomist and palaeo-anthropologist Phillip Tobias said it was the only physiological change he knew of that was brought about by speech.
It was also, of course, the surest badge of authenticity Traill could have wished for, had he needed or wanted one.
Traill, who died of a brain tumour, is survived by his wife Jill and three children.
Winifred Lehman and Carol Justus
Two people who should be remembered for their contributions to functional linguistics died on August 1, 2007, on the same day: Winfred Lehmann (91) and his student Carol Justus (67). Both lived in Austin, Texas.
They were instrumental in organizing the LSA's Linguistic Institute at the State University of New York in Oswego, NY, in the summer of 1976. This Institute pulled together the burgeoning field of functional linguistics and launched the typological-pragmatic orientation that has become a major focus for modern linguistics. Carol was the director and the energizing force that saw in the scattered work of a number of heterodox linguists of the time a force that would challenge the formalist mainstream. She corralled Joseph Greenberg as Institute Professor and Win Lehmann as Collitz Professor and Associate Director, and proclaimed Typology and Universals as the theme of the Institute. She brought in Talmy (Tom) Givon, Sandy Thompson, Joan Bybee, Bernard Comrie, Marianne Mithun, Paul Hopper, Charles Li, Linda Waugh and others as faculty, a nexus that resulted, down the years, in a significant reorientation of linguistics. To it are owed, ultimately, Funknet, the book series Typological Studies in Language, and many individual publications. Carol was an Indo-Europeanist and Hittitologist in her own right, and made many contributions to the study of writing systems, early Indo-European, and the Hittite language. Functionalism's debt to Carol Justus is enormous and little recognized.
Win Lehmann, a Germanist and Indo-Europeanist, was a towering figure in 20th century linguistics, whose full obituary has yet to be written. He is the only person to have been president of both the major U.S. organizations of language scholars, the Linguistic Society of America and the Modern Language Association. He received honors from Germany for his contributions to the study of German and from the Indian government for his studies of Sanskrit. As a young officer in the Second World War he directed Japanese language instruction for the U.S. army and was active in the decoding of Japanese dispatches. During the 1976 LSA Institute he supervised a lecture series which became the influential collection 'Syntactic Typology: Studies in the Phenomenology of Language'. He pioneered the application of typological methods to historical linguistics. His textbooks 'Descriptive Linguistics: An Introduction' and 'Historical Linguistics' introduced an entire generation of linguists to the two major divisions of the discipline.
Paul Hopper
Blair Rudes
Blair Rudes died 16 March, 2008. An internationally known linguist and expert in American Indian languages, Dr. Rudes served on the faculty of UNC Charlotte since 1999, and joined the LSA in 2002.
During his career at UNC Charlotte, Dr. Rudes became famous as a "Hollywood linguist". In 2004, film director Terrence Malick hired Dr. Rudes to work as a consultant and dialect coach for the film The New World, which deals with the founding of Jamestown and the interaction between the Native people and the English settlers. Malick wanted the American Indian characters to speak in their native language, but this language had been extinct for over 200 years. Dr. Rudes drew on his expertise in the history of American Indian languages to revive the Virginia Algonquian language. He then translated the dialog spoken by the Native characters into Virginia Algonquian and coached the actors on how to pronounce their lines in this language. Dr. Rudes' contributions to this film attracted widespread publicity including a feature story in the New York Times. Impressed with Dr. Rudes' contributions to The New World, film director Carter Smith hired Dr. Rudes to serve as the Mayan Dialogue Coach for the film The Ruins, which will be released by Dreamworks later in 2008.
As a scholar, Dr. Rudes is best known for writing the Tuscarora-English/English-Tuscarora Dictionary, which the University of Toronto Press published in 1999. He also edited several other books and published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. At the time of his death, he was completing a three-volume work titled The Catawba Language.
In recent years, Dr Rudes received several important honors. In 2006, the Tuscarora Indian Nation honored him for his contributions to preserving the Tuscarora language. In 2007, the South Carolina General Assembly passed a bill honoring Dr. Rudes for his contribution to the South Carolina Commission for Minority Affairs. Most recently, the State University of New York at Buffalo (where Dr. Rudes received his Ph.D. in 1976) gave him with their Distinguished Alumni Award.
Austin Joseph Sawicki
March 24, 1982 - May 29, 2008
A bright new star now shines in the heavens. Austin Joseph Sawicki, 26, died in a construction accident in San Diego on May 29, 2008. "AJ," the son of John Sawicki and Mary Aloi of Escondido, graduated from Poway High School in 2000. He went on to attend Gonzaga University where he graduated Cum Laude in 2004 with a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion. He then secured a full scholarship to attend Northern Illinois University, and he obtained his M.A. in Anthropology in 2006 while working as a Graduate Instructor in the Women's Studies Department. Austin was in the final stages of completing his thesis for his second masters in Anthropology, and his goal was to obtain his PhD and become a University Professor.
Austin loved life and lived it to the fullest. His world was filled with laughter, friends, and a quest of knowledge, and he touched every life around him with his compassion, love, and amazing sense of humor. He will be remembered for a million things, from his great smile to his beautiful paintings, from his smooth dance moves to his fresh home-baked bread.
Austin is survived by his father John Sawicki and partner Laura, his mother Mary Aloi and husband Nick, and his beloved sister Mandi Zimmer, along with his brother-in law (BIL) Scott and his niece Maren and newborn nephew Wesley Austin, in whom he took such pride and joy. Also surviving him are his Grandpa Walt Sawicki, his Grandma "MacDaddy" Ruthie McMichael, and his extended family: Uncle Alan and Auntie Ahme Erickson with cousin/soul-mate, Emily, his Uncle Dave and Aunt Gaye Sawicki, cousins Russ and fiancé Claire, Jon, Aunt Nancy Sawicki, Mike Polakof, Uncle Joseph Sawicki, Great-Uncle Gayle and Great-Aunt Virginia. Dancing with him in Heaven are his Grandma Mary Kay Sawicki and Uncle Larry Sawicki.
A celebration of Austin's life will be held this Saturday, June 7, at 10:00am at the Church at Rancho Bernardo, 11740 Bernardo Plaza Court, San Diego, CA 92128. In lieu of flowers, you may contribute to the Austin Sawicki Memorial Fund, by mailing your check to Austin's Mother at 2529 Douglaston Glen, Escondido, CA 92027.
