Winfred P. Lehmann | |
|---|---|
 Lehmann, pictured in his 1977Festschrift | |
| Born | (1916-06-23)June 23, 1916 Surprise, Nebraska, U.S. |
| Died | August 1, 2007(2007-08-01) (aged 91) Austin, Texas, U.S. |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Awards | Commander's Cross of theOrder of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1987) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Wisconsin |
| Doctoral advisor | |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Linguistics |
| Sub-discipline | Historical linguistics |
| Institutions | |
| Main interests | |
| Notable works | |
| Notable ideas | OV /VO dichotomy,Fundamental Principle of Placement (FPP) |
Winfred Philip Lehmann (June 23, 1916 – August 1, 2007) was an American linguist who specialized inhistorical,Germanic, andIndo-European linguistics. He was for many years a professor and head of departments for linguistics at theUniversity of Texas at Austin, and served as president of both theLinguistic Society of America and theModern Language Association. Lehmann was also a pioneer inmachine translation. He lectured a large number of future scholars at Austin, and was the author of several influential works on linguistics.
Winfred P. Lehmann was born inSurprise, Nebraska, on June 23, 1916, the son of theLutheran minister Philipp Ludwig Lehmann and Elenore Friederike Grosnick.[4] The family wasGerman-American and spokeGerman at home. They moved toWisconsin while Lehmann was a boy.[5]
After graduating from high school, Lehmann studiedGerman andclassical philology atNorthwestern College, where he received hisBA inhumanities in 1936.[5] He subsequently enrolled at theUniversity of Wisconsin. At Wisconsin, Lehmann specialized inphonetics andIndo-European andGermanic philology. He studied a variety of topics, including the works ofJohn Milton andHomer,German literature, and became proficient in a diverse number of languages, includingOld Church Slavonic,Lithuanian,Old Irish,Sanskrit andOld Persian.[6] His command of languages would eventually extend toArabic,Hebrew,Japanese,Turkish, and several branches of the Indo-European languages, includingCeltic, Germanic,Italic,Balto-Slavic,Hellenic,Anatolian andIndo-Iranian.[7]
Among his teachers at the University of Wisconsin were the Indo-Europeanist and BalticistAlfred E. Senn, CelticistMyles Dillon, ScandinavistEinar Haugen, andMorris Swadesh,William Freeman Twaddell andRoe-Merrill S. Heffner. Haugen's fieldwork amongScandinavian Americans would prove highly influential for Lehmann's later work onsociolinguistics. With Swadesh, Lehmann carried out studies on theHo-Chunk people. Twaddell and Heffner were to have the strongest influence on him. He spent much time working with Heffner on phonetics, and the two co-wrote several articles ondialectology andsociophonetics for the journalAmerican Speech, which are still of importance to scholars today.[8] Lehmann gained hisMA in 1938, and hisPhD in 1941, both inGermanic linguistics at Wisconsin.[4] His PhD thesis on verbs in Germanic languages was co-directed by Twaddell and Heffner.[6]
From 1942 to 1946, Lehmann served in theSignal Corps of the United States Army.[4] DuringWorld War II he was an instructor in Japanese for the United States Army, and eventually became officer-in-charge of the Japanese Language School. The administrative experience and knowledge of non-Indo-European languages that he acquired during the war would have a major impact on his later career.[6]
Since 1946, Lehmann taught atWashington University in St. Louis, where he served as instructor (1946) and as assistant professor (1946–1949) of German.[4] Wishing to focus more on linguistics and philology rather than only the German language, he arranged withLeonard Bloomfield to spend the summer atYale University to catch up with advances in linguistics during the war, but these plans came to nothing after Bloomfield suffered a debilitatingstroke.[6]
In 1949, Lehmann transferred to theUniversity of Texas at Austin, which at the time had about 12,000 students and was known for its strength in philology and for its university library.[6] He subsequently served as Associate Professor (1949–1951) and Professor (1951–1962) ofGermanic Languages at University of Texas at Austin.[4] During this time Lehmann published his influential workProto-Indo-European Phonology (1952).[1][2]
Since 1953, Lehmann served as Chairman of the Department of Germanic Languages (1953–1964), Acting Chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages (1960–1965). In 1963 he was made Ashbel Smith Professor ofLinguistics and Germanic Linguistics (1963–1983). The Ashbel Smith professorship accorded him twice the salary of an ordinary professor.[1] In 1964, Lehmann became the founding Chairman of the Department of Linguistics (1964–1972).[4][9]
As the chairman of both the Germanic and linguistics departments, Lehmann oversaw the development of highly successful first-rate programs in German and linguistics. Knowledge of languages, and linguistics in particular, was in great demand after the launching ofSputnik 1, and his programs received generous funding through theNational Defense Education Act and from theNational Science Foundation.[10] His efforts were greatly aided by the strong support he received from university presidentHarry Ransom.[11] Lehmann arranged world-class conferences in both linguistics and German literature, established several linguistic institutes, a Visiting Writer's Program, and hired numerous distinguished professors in German and linguistics.[12] Scholars hired by him during this time includeEmmon Bach,Robert T. Harms,Edgar C. Polomé andWerner Winter.[9] In 1961, Lehmann established theLinguistics Research Center (LRC), of which he was Director until his death. Through the LRC, he secured millions in funding to the field ofmachine translation andhistorical linguistics. Lehmann was also instrumental in the establishment of the Arabic Center (later the Center for Middle Eastern Studies) and the Hindi-Telugu Center (later the Center for South Asian Studies).[10] He notably cooperated withGardner Lindzey on developing studies inpsycholinguistics.[12]
Lehmann was well known for his teaching style, and notably encouraged his students to seek to understand his lectures rather than just simply writing them down. Instead of only grading his students' papers and exams, he would give them detailed evaluations of their performance, and encouraged them to pursue and develop ideas. Lehmann strongly encouraged his students to seek having their works published in academic journals.[12]
Under the leadership of Lehmann, the departments for Germanic languages and linguistics at University of Texas at Austin both became among the top five graduate programs in North America, which they remained for 25 years.[13] Almost ten percent of all PhDs awarded in linguistics in the United States during this time came from the University of Texas at Austin.[11] He supervised more than fifty PhDs and mentored hundreds of students, many of whom would acquire prominent positions in their respective fields.[1]
Lehmann was president of theLinguistic Society of America in 1973, and president of theModern Language Association of America in 1987. He remains the only person to have led both of these organizations, which are the two most important and prestigious professional organizations for linguistics in the United States.[5][2] Throughout his career, Lehmann was also Member of theAssociation for Computational Linguistics (President in 1964), theSociety for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, theAmerican Oriental Society,Société de Linguistique de Paris,Indogermanische Gesellschaft,Linguistic Society of India,Societas Linguistica Europaea,Early English Text Society, the board of directors of theAmerican Council of Learned Societies, Corresponding Member of theInstitut für Deutsche Sprache, chair of the board of trustees of theCenter for Applied Linguistics (1974–), and Corresponding Fellow of theRoyal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.[4][2] He was also aFulbright andGuggenheim Fellow.[14]
Combined with his teaching and administrative duties, Lehmann was engaged with research and writing. HisHistorical Linguistics: An Introduction (1962) has been translated into Japanese, German,Spanish andItalian, and remains a standard work on historical linguistics. He edited theReader in Nineteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics (1967), which remains a standard work on bothIndo-European, historical, andcomparative linguistics. HisProto-Indo-European Syntax (1974) was hailed as breakthrough by linguistRobert J. Jeffers, who reviewed it in the journalLanguage.[1]Studies in Descriptive and Historical Linguistics, afestschrift in Lehmann's honor, was published in 1977 under the editorship ofPaul Hopper.[3] His influentialSyntactic Typology was published in 1981.[2]
In 1983, Lehmann was made Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in the Humanities at University of Texas at Austin.[4] He received the Harry H. Ransom Award for Teaching Excellence in the Liberal Arts in 1983, which he would describe as the greatest honor of his career.[14] In 1984, together with fellow researcher Jonathan Slocum, Lehmann developed a groundbreaking prototype computer program for language translation, which the LRC put into commercial production forSiemens.[2]
Lehmann retired as Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor Emeritus in the Humanities in 1986.[4] Although having retired from teaching, he was still very active as a researcher at the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and continued to write books and articles.[5] In 1986 Lehmann founded the journalComputers and Translation, nowMachine Translation, of which he was the founding editor.[2] HisGothic Etymological Dictionary (1986) has been described as the best work ever published on Germanicetymology.[1] He received the Commander's Cross of theOrder of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1987.[2]
Notable works authored by Lehmann during his final years include the third edition ofHistorical Linguistics (1992) andTheoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics (1993).[2]Language Change and Typological Variation, a second festschrift in his honor, was published by the Institute for the Study of Man in 1999 under the editorship of Edgar C. Polomé andCarol F. Justus.[3] Lehmann completed his final monograph,Pre-Indo-European (2002), at the age of 86.[12]
Lehmann was preceded in death by his wife Ruth and his son Terry, and died in Austin, Texas on August 1, 2007.[9]
Throughout his career, Lehmann wrote more than fifty books and special issues of journals, and over 250 articles and more than 140 reviews. These works covered a diverse set of topics, includingMiddle High German literature,Japanese grammar, Old Irish,Biblical Hebrew, and textbooks on the German language.[15] His contributions to the fields of Indo-European, Germanic and historical linguistics, and machine translation, have been significant, and several of his works on these subjects have remained standard texts up to the present day. He is remembered for his crucial role in establishing the University of Texas at Austin as one of America's leading institutions in linguistics, and for the large numbers of students that he taught and mentored, many of whom have made major contributions to scholarship.[16]
Lehmann married Ruth Preston Miller on October 12, 1940, whom he met while studying at the University of Wisconsin. A specialist inCeltic linguistics andOld English, Ruth was Professor ofEnglish at the University of Texas at Austin. Winfred and Ruth had two children, Terry Jon and Sandra Jean.[4][5]
Winfred and Ruth were bothenvironmentalists and animal-lovers. They donated 160 acres (0.65 km2) of land in the northwest ofTravis County, Texas toThe Nature Conservancy to create the Ruth Lehmann Memorial Tract. The family inhabited a spacious house onLake Travis, where they cared for rescued animals.[3]
Aside from linguistics and the environment, Lehmann's great passion was literature, particularlyearly Germanic literature and the novels of his friendRaja Rao andJames Joyce. He was also a skilledpianist. Lehmann was a close friend ofJohn Archibald Wheeler, with whom he shared an interest for literature. Despite his wide circle of friends, Lehmann was nevertheless a very private man.[3]
