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Old September 9th, 2005 #1
Alex Linder
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Default Berkeley linguistics founder dies (Emeneau)

Founder of UC Berkeley's linguistics department, American Indian language survey, dies

By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations | 09 September 2005

Murray Barnson Emeneau, emeritus professor of linguistics and Sanskrit (John Ohala photo)

BERKELEY – Murray Barnson Emeneau, emeritus professor of linguistics and Sanskrit at the University of California, Berkeley, an expert in "language areas" and the Dravidian languages of south and central India, and founder of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, died on Aug. 29 at the age of 101. He died in his sleep in his Berkeley home.

Born on Feb. 28, 1904, in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, Emeneau studied French, German and Latin in high school. He studied Greek and Latin at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1923, then at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and finally at Yale University as a graduate student in classics. Emeneau moved into the study of Sanskrit and received his Ph.D. at Yale in 1931.

He worked for several years as a lecturer and researcher in Sanskrit at Yale, where he was heavily influenced by Edward Sapir, one of the greatest linguists of the 20th century who joined Yale's faculty in 1931. Emeneau attended his classes, among them the famous field methods class on Wishram, a Chinookan language spoken in Oregon. On Sapir's suggestion, Emeneau went to India in 1936 to work on Toda, a non-literary Dravidian language. He stayed in India for three years, doing linguistic fieldwork on the Toda, Badaga, Kolami and Kota languages.

Emeneau was hired in the classics department at UC Berkeley in 1940 as an assistant professor of Sanskrit and general linguistics.

During World War II, he worked on Vietnamese, about which he wrote three books and a volume of grammatical studies. He became an associate professor at UC Berkeley in 1943 and was promoted to full professor in 1946. Emeneau wrote 21 books and, by the time of his death, his other publications numbered in the triple digits.

When Emeneau first went to India, no linguistic fieldwork on the non-literary Dravidian languages had been done. The literary languages of the Dravidian language family were well known, but the field of Dravidian linguistics didn't yet exist because most of the languages of the family were not known to scholars.

Emeneau created this field through work that includes grammars of Kolami and Toda, published in 1955 and 1984, and a Kota text collection published in three volumes between 1944 and 1946. His 1939 article in the journal Language on the Badaga language is still the clearest study of a unique phenomenon in the world's languages: a system of vowels that includes not one, but two degrees of retroflexion -- a quality like the sound of English "er".

Another of Emeneau's major achievements in Dravidian studies is the "Dravidian Etymological Dictionary," written with Thomas Burrow and first published in 1961.

Emeneau is also generally seen as having initiated the modern field of "linguistic areas" in his 1956 article "India as a Linguistic Area," that was published in the issue of Language that honored UC Berkeley anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber on his 80th birthday.

Emeneau's work in this field continued with studies of mutual linguistic influences, including a 1962 book with Burrow on Dravidian borrowings from Indo-Aryan. In the history of linguistics at UC Berkeley, he mediated between Kroeber's interest in "culture areas" and the larger-scale areal focus of UC Berkeley 's Johanna Nichols, a professor of Slavic languages.

Yet Emeneau's perspective and contributions to the field were original and grounded in his own formation, and among his first articles, published 69 years ago in Language, was a study of the English dialect of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, where he grew up.

In 1949, he served as president of the Linguistic Society of America, writing as his presidential address a paper about the relationship between linguistic and social structures in the area of kinship.

He persuaded UC Berkeley to establish a Survey of California Indian Languages and a Department of Linguistics, which he chaired from 1953 to 1956. After a year's sabbatical, he resumed the post for one year.

The Survey of California Indian Languages later became the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, indirectly succeeding the Ethnographic and Linguistic Survey of California established by Kroeber in 1901.

"It was and remains an immensely significant institution for the documentation of the indigenous languages of California and elsewhere in the United States outside Alaska and Hawaii," said Andrew Garrett, acting director of the survey and a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics.

In the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, under the leadership of Mary Haas, a fellow student of Sapir's whom Emeneau hired, generations of graduate students documented words, grammatical structures and texts in dozens of California languages, Garrett noted. Some of those languages have few or no remaining native speakers today, he added.

Now, he said, the mission of the survey has expanded to include language documentation throughout the United States and in other parts of the western hemisphere -- as well as numerous projects designed to make the results of that documentation accessible to native communities in California.

"It is now probably the most important university archive of documentary material on the languages of the continental U.S.," Garrett said.

Emeneau was named the Collitz Professor of the Linguistic Society of America in 1953. In 1954, he served as president of the American Oriental Society.

He gave the UC Berkeley Faculty Research Lecture in 1956. On his retirement from the campus in 1971, he received UC Berkeley's highest honor, the Berkeley Citation.

Emeneau also was the recipient of four honorary degrees, the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal from Yale, and the Medal of Merit of the American Oriental Society, Emeneau was also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the British Academy, and an honorary member of the Philological Society and of the Linguistic Society of India. He was the sole honorary member of the Philological Society, the oldest linguistic professional society in the English speaking world.

"Of all the linguists of the 20th century -- general, theoretical, historical or descriptive -- whom I have known personally or with whose work I am familiar, Murray Emeneau is the one I most admire both as a scholar and as a man," said Ron Asher, professor of theoretical and applied linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and a former Emeneau student.

William Bright, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the University of Colorado and one of Emeneau's former students, agreed that Emeaneau's students learned more from him than linguistics.

"They also learned something about the highest goals and standards of scholarship, about meticulousness in research and writing, about the importance of making one's findings available to colleagues through publication, and about dedicated professionalism, in general," he said.

Emeneau is survived by a step-daughter, Phyllis Savage, of Tustin, Calif.

A campus memorial is tentatively planned for spring 2006.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/r..._emeneau.shtml
 
Old September 9th, 2005 #2
Alex Linder
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Old September 9th, 2005 #3
Alex Linder
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Perhaps the odd gentile named Murray?
 
Old September 10th, 2005 #4
Mike
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Linder
Perhaps the odd gentile named Murray?
I have to ask why you posted this. I have always been interested in linguistics in an amateur sort of way so I naturally found this article interesting, but its import seems distant from WN to me.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Linder
His 1939 article in the journal Language on the Badaga language is still the clearest study of a unique phenomenon in the world's languages: a system of vowels that includes not one, but two degrees of retroflexion -- a quality like the sound of English "er".
For vowels, a quality like the sound of mid-American English "er", the article should have said. If you're from England you may have trouble applying the sound to vowels (compare American and British pronunciation of 'bird') although the consonant 'R' is unproblematic in both accents. Retroflexion means the sides of the tongue spread and the the tip of the tongue goes towards the roof of the mouth. It's not a common phonemic distinction at all. Very few languages in the world distinguish one degree. No major European language has it except English, and it's dying in England. I had to think before I could even imagine a two degree distinction being possible. I guess the two degrees could be described as being like American "bird" and the Irish-English rendition of the same word, with the tongue being pulled even farther back in the latter case.
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Old September 10th, 2005 #5
Mike
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Default Murray Barnson Emeneau

Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Linder
Perhaps the odd gentile named Murray?
Can't find a biography but here is an off-the-hip guess. New England did absorb a sprinkling of French Huguenots who intermixed with the Anglo-Saxon natives. 'Emeneau' is clearly French. 'Barnson' is clearly English and not Jewish. My guess is this guy is a regular liberal from the American Northeast.
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Old September 10th, 2005 #6
Fritz Kuhn
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Linder
Perhaps the odd gentile named Murray?
Jews in Europe did not have names like Murray. They were called Yosel, Yankel and Liebel. When they came to the US in the late 1800's they began to "anglicize" their names to Morris, Lewis and Sidney. In fact, jews adopted these names in such number that they began to be perceived as jewish names. Murray is a name many jews took, but in 1904 when Mr. Emeneau was born in Eastern Canada, it is not likely the name had any jewish implications. See also, H.L. Mencken:The American Language. 1921.

http://www.bartleby.com/185/49.html
 
Old September 10th, 2005 #7
Alex Linder
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike
I have to ask why you posted this. I have always been interested in linguistics in an amateur sort of way so I naturally found this article interesting, but its import seems distant from WN to me.
I just came across it, thought it might be of interest to someone, or someone might know something about this guy. I have never heard of him. All part of filling in the blanks left by substandard System education. What I know is that real -- physical -- anthropology was the province of White men, and that this area was largely destroyed or driven underground by jew Boas, and that his foul lies were spread from coast to coast by his disciples, creating departments of anthropology founded on his false proposition that culture is everything.
 
Old September 10th, 2005 #8
Alex Linder
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Fritz Kuhn
Jews in Europe did not have names like Murray. They were called Yosel, Yankel and Liebel. When they came to the US in the late 1800's they began to "anglicize" their names to Morris, Lewis and Sidney. In fact, jews adopted these names in such number that they began to be perceived as jewish names. Murray is a name many jews took, but in 1904 when Mr. Emeneau was born in Eastern Canada, it is not likely the name had any jewish implications. See also, H.L. Mencken:The American Language. 1921.

http://www.bartleby.com/185/49.html
I'm aware of that. It was jews of roughly Emeneau's generation that adopted the Murrays and Llewellyns. I suspect this guy is not a jew, but I don't know anything for a fact.
 
Old September 10th, 2005 #9
Alex Linder
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Murray Barnson Emeneau (1904-2005)

Murray Barnson Emeneau, emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, died in his sleep at home on Monday, August 29, 2005. He was 101.

Prof. Emeneau's family history illuminates his life; this history began 350 years ago amidst the Anglo-French wars in Europe and the New World. Expelling the Acadians on their North American odyssey, the British colonial authorities in Nova Scotia arranged to import Protestants of various nationalities. So it was, sailing in 1752 on the Speedwell out of Rotterdam, that Samuel Emoneau and his son Frederick brought their families to Halifax from the Payée de Montbéliard, then a francophone Lutheran principality and now a part of France. In the following year, together with other Montbéliardians and English, German, and Swiss Protestants, the Emoneaus were among the founding settlers of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. French may have fallen out of use by the early nineteenth century, but German was still used in public as late as 1888 in Lunenburg.

In this multilingual context Murray Emeneau was born on February 28, 1904. As a student of languages — French, German, and Latin — Murray Emeneau was the top high school student in Nova Scotia three years running. He studied Greek and Latin at Dalhousie University, where he got his bachelor's degree in 1923, then at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and finally at Yale as a graduate student in Classics. At that time George Bobrinskoy, Franklin Edgerton, and Eduard Prokosch taught Indo-European and Sanskrit at Yale, and with them Murray moved into the study of Sanskrit. He received his Ph.D. in 1931 after editing for his dissertation a Sanskrit text, published in 1934. Academic positions in Sanskrit were hard to come by in the Depression, and Dr. Emeneau worked at Yale for several years as a lecturer and research Sanskritist. During those years linguistics at Yale was transformed by the arrival of Edward Sapir in 1931. Dr. Emeneau attended Sapir's classes, among them the famous field methods class on Wishram, and on Sapir's suggestion he went to India in 1936 to work not on Sanskrit or its Indo-Aryan descendants but on Toda, a non-literary Dravidian language. He stayed in India for three years, doing linguistic fieldwork not only on Toda but ultimately also on Badaga, Kolami, and Kota.

With the death of the Berkeley Sanskritist Arthur Ryder, and after two final years at Yale, Dr. Emeneau was hired in the Classics Department at Berkeley, where he arrived in 1940 as an assistant professor of Sanskrit and general linguistics. The war brought him to work on Vietnamese, on which he wrote three pedagogical books and a volume of grammatical studies; on the campus academic ladder he became an associate professor in 1943 and was promoted to the rank of full professor 59 years ago in 1946. Prof. Emeneau wrote some 21 books in all, and already in 1967 he had written 77 articles and 68 reviews; these numbers have now surely reached the triple digits. Our colleague contributed to many areas of linguistics and allied disciplines, but it seems right to single out two fields he helped create: the study of the minority Dravidian languages of India and the study of what he called 'language areas'.

When Prof. Emeneau first went to India, no linguistic fieldwork on the non-literary Dravidian languages had ever been done. The literary languages of the family were well known, but the field of Dravidian linguistics was a tabula rasa because the systematic comparative and historical study of these languages requires treating the minority languages as seriously as those with literary traditions. Prof. Emeneau created this field through work that includes grammars of Kolami and Toda, published in 1955 and 1984, and a Kota text collection published in three volumes from 1944 to 1946. While linguistically important — for example, his 1939 Language article on Badaga is still the clearest study of the only known vowel system with two degrees of vowel retroflexion — Prof. Emeneau's work is by no means narrowly linguistic. Thus his 1971 masterpiece Toda Songs is as significant for ethnopoetics as his other work is in linguistics. But surely Prof. Emeneau's greatest achievement in Dravidian studies is the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, written with Thomas Burrow and first published in 1961. Despite the characteristic reserve that eschewed reconstruction this work, revised in a 1984 second edition, remains the indispensible guide, tool, and authority for every Dravidianist.

Prof. Emeneau is also generally seen as having initiated the modern field of areal linguistics, and by the way having introduced the term 'linguistic area' to general linguists, in his 1956 article 'India as a Linguistic Area', published in the issue of Language honoring A. L. Kroeber on his 80th birthday. His work in this field continued with a series of studies of mutual linguistic influences, including a 1962 book with Burrow on Dravidian borrowings from Indo-Aryan; in the history of linguistics at Berkeley he thus mediates between Kroeber's interest in so-called 'culture areas' and the larger-scale areal typology of Johanna Nichols and her équipe. Prof. Emeneau's perspective and contributions to the field were entirely original, though, and grounded in his own formation: among his first articles, published 69 years ago in the eleventh volume of Language, was a study of the English dialect of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. It is surely significant both for his career and for the subsequent history of our field that this piece was no mere dossier of structural elements but an inquiry into their origins in language contact. What for a thing is that? said the Lunenburger a century ago, Don't fress; it tastes leppish.

Prof. Emeneau's career had the trajectory of an enormously accomplished and influential scholar. In 1949 he served as the 25th President of the Linguistic Society of America, writing as his presidential address a paper, published in Language in 1950, on the mutually determining relationship between linguistic and social structures in the area of kinship; in 1954 he was then president of the American Oriental Society. In 1952, offered a position as his teacher Edgerton's successor at Yale, he persuaded this university to establish a Survey of California Indian Languages and a Department of Linguistics, which he subsequently chaired. Prof. Emeneau was named the Collitz Professor of the Linguistic Society of America in 1953, and at Berkeley he gave the Faculty Research Lecture in 1956, one of only three members of our department to have received this highest campus research honor; on his retirement in 1971 he was the 35th recipient of the Berkeley Citation. The recipient of four honorary degrees, the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal from Yale, and the Medal of Merit of the American Oriental Society, Prof. Emeneau was also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and an honorary member of the Philological Society and of the Linguistic Society of India. Across the globe his friends, colleagues, and students will miss him.

— Andrew Garrett
Books by Murray B. Emeneau

Jambhaladatta's Version of the Vetālapañcavinśati: A Critical Sanskrit Text in Transliteration (1934)
A Course in Annamese: Lessons in the Pronunciation and Grammar of the Annamese Language (1943)
The Sinduvāra Tree in Sanskrit Literature (1944)
Kota Texts (3 vols, 1944-46)
An Annamese Reader (with Lý-duc-Lâm and Diether von den Steinen, 1944)
Annamese-English Dictionary (with Diether von den Steinen, 1945)
The Strangling Figs in Sanskrit Literature (1949)
Studies in Vietnamese (Annamese) Grammar (1951)
Kolami, a Dravidian Language (1955)
A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (with T. Burrow, 1961; 2nd ed. 1984)
Brahui and Dravidian Comparative Grammar (1962)
Abhijñāna-Śakuntala: Translated from the Bengali Recension (1962)
Dravidian Borrowings from Indo-Aryan (with T. Burrow, 1962)
India and Historical Grammar (1965)
Sanskrit Sandhi and Exercises (1968)
Dravidian Comparative Phonology: A Sketch (1970)
Toda Songs (1971)
Ritual Structure and Language Structure of the Todas (1974)
Language and Linguistic Areas: Essays (1980)
Toda Grammar and Texts (1984)
Dravidian Studies: Selected Papers (1994)

http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/...neau/obit.html
 
Old September 10th, 2005 #10
Alex Linder
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This is a type that no longer exists. Our culture can't produce it. His spot will be taken by some semitically correct lesbian who knows very little worth knowing about anything except how to work with fellowess mediocrities to keep out talent.
 
Old September 10th, 2005 #11
Alex Linder
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Have we got anybody here who studied with the man, or who can give us any personal recollections of him and his classes?
 
Old September 10th, 2005 #12
Alex Linder
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This is the kind of comment I hate when others make it, but the guy doesn't have the face of the jew. He looks too well adjusted, with smile crinkles and honesty in his eyes. Jews tend to look vaguely angry or crooked or guileful.
 
Old September 10th, 2005 #13
Alex Linder
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Camille Paglia talks about great learning - real erudition. That is what we who fund universities have a right to expect. This guy is an example of the type.

Paglia talks about the humor and eccentricity tolerated and even encouraged in the great German and British universities in the 19th century. That patrimony to some degree made its way into the better American colleges. But today it has been wiped out, replaced by conniving kikes and kiko-conformity on the part of the mediocre women and fags and cut-rate coloreds who seem to be the only ones hireable these days.
 
Old September 10th, 2005 #14
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rhoades scholar, yale, studied under and directed by a "sapir". Anyone wishing to control knowledge of early history would see the benefit of controlling the study of Sanskrit. Has a funny smell like ham you're not sure has turned.
Edit:sapir born 1884 to orthodox jew family, Lauenburg Germany. Moved to jew york.
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Last edited by Whirlwind; September 10th, 2005 at 06:53 AM.
 
Old September 10th, 2005 #15
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Quote:
This is a type that no longer exists. Our culture can't produce it. His spot will be taken by some semitically correct lesbian who knows very little worth knowing about anything except how to work with fellowess mediocrities to keep out talent.
The standards in the universities are slipping even more as "democratic" ideas continue to propagate. At one point only a small fraction of the population went on to college after highschool. Now it is nearly a third.

Your typical college campus is full of idiots who are more interested in watching TV and partying than reading books and thinking.

My major is physics, but I have been in history classes where I practically know more than the fat negress TA about the topic at hand because she is so inured with the standard lies about Uncle Adolf. After all, I've actually read Mein Kampf.

Most classes consist of regurgitating crap the Jew professor lectures about with little real thinking or discussion about matters. Everyone is highly ignorant about even the simplest facts concerning the world today, and this is the MOST frustrating part about college for me. You can't even ask people to discuss an issue because they lack any context for doing so.
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