In Memoriam

Shown below are deceased faculty colleagues in the Department of Linguistics [ Collapse all Expand all ].

Murray B. Emeneau (1904-2005)

Murray B. Emeneau in 1999

  • PhD Yale 1931
  • Taught at Berkeley from 1940 to 1971 (in Classics and Linguistics)
  • Chair, Graduate Group in Linguistics, 1947-1953, and Department of Linguistics, 1953-1957
  • President, Linguistic Society of America, 1949

Selected publications

  • "The vowels of the Badaga language" (1939)
  • Kota Texts (1944-46)
  • Studies in Vietnamese (Annamese) Grammar (1951)
  • Kolami: A Dravidian Language (1955)
  • "India as a linguistic area" (1956)
  • Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (with T. Burrow, 1961, rev. ed. 1984)
  • Sanskrit Sandhi and Exercises (1968)
  • Toda Songs (1971)
  • Language and Linguistic Areas (1980)
  • Toda Grammar and Texts (1984)
  • "Bloomfield and Pāṇini" (1988)
  • Dravidian Studies (1994)

Memorals and obituaries

Jesse O. Sawyer (1918-1986)

Wappo fieldnotes by Jesse Sawyer with Laura Somersal

  • PhD Berkeley 1959
  • Taught at Berkeley from 1957 to 1978 (in Speech and Linguistics)
  • Distinguished Teaching Award, 1962
  • Founding director, Language Laboratory (now incorporated into the Berkeley Language Center), 1961-1978

Selected publications

Memorials and obituaries

Charles J. Fillmore (1929-2014)

Charles Fillmore

  • PhD Michigan 1961
  • Taught at Berkeley from 1970 to 1994
  • Chair, Department of Linguistics, 1979-1983
  • President, Linguistic Society of America, 1991

Selected publications

Memorials and obituaries

C. Douglas Chrétien (1904-1969)

"The Battle Book of the O'Donnells" by C. Douglas Chrétien

  • PhD Harvard 1932
  • Taught at Berkeley from 1931 to 1969 (in Public Speaking, Classics, and Linguistics)
  • Director, Linguistic Institute, 1951

Selected publications

  • The Battle Book of the O'Donnells (1935)
  • "Quantitative classification of Indo-European languages" (with A. L. Kroeber, 1937)
  • "The quantitative method for determining linguistic relationships" (1943)
  • The Dialect of the Sierra de Mariveles Negritos (1951)
  • "The mathematical models of glottochronology" (1962)
  • "Genetic linguistics and the probability model" (1966)

Memorials and obituaries

Yakov Malkiel (1914-1998)

Yakov Malkiel in Salamanca, 1994

  • PhD Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Berlin, 1938
  • Taught at Berkeley from 1942 to 1982 (in Spanish & Portuguese, Romance Philology, and Linguistics)
  • Founding editor, Romance Philology, 1946-1983
  • President, Linguistic Society of America, 1965
  • Author of over 850 publications

Selected publications

  • Das substantivierte Adjektiv im Französischen (1938)
  • Development of the Latin Suffixes -antia and -entia in Romance Languages (1945)
  • "Lexical polarization in Romance" (1951)
  • Studies in the Reconstruction of Hispano-Latin Word Families (1954)
  • "Linguistics as a genetic science" (1967)
  • "The inflectional paradigm as an occasional determinant of sound change" (1968)
  • "The classification of Romance languages" (1978)
  • "Problems in the diachronic differentiation of near-homophones" (1979)
  • Etymology (1993)

Memorials and obituaries

Mary R. Haas (1910-1996)

Mary R. Haas

  • PhD Yale 1935
  • Taught at Berkeley from 1943 to 1977 (in Oriental Languages and Linguistics)
  • Chair, Department of Linguistics, 1957-1964
  • President, Linguistic Society of America, 1963

Selected publications

  • Tunica (1941)
  • Phonetic Dictionary of the Thai Language (1947)
  • Tunica Texts (1950)
  • Tunica Dictionary (1953)
  • "Algonkian-Ritwan: The end of a controversy" (1958)
  • The Prehistory of Languages (1969)
  • Language, Culture, and History (1978)

Memorials and obituaries

Madison S. Beeler (1910-1989)

Madison Beeler

  • PhD Harvard 1936
  • Taught at Berkeley from 1941 to 1977 (in German and Linguistics)

Selected publications

Memorials and obituaries

Karl Zimmer (1927-2019)

Karl Zimmer

  • PhD Columbia 1963
  • Taught at Berkeley from 1965 to 1991
  • Chair, Department of Linguistics, 1974-1979, 1983-1986

Memorials and obituaries

Gary B. Holland (1943-2019)

Gary B. Holland

  • PhD Berkeley 1980
  • Taught at Berkeley from 1980 to 2017 (in Celtic, Scandinavian, and Linguistics)

Selected publications