Frans Van Coetsem
Encyclopedia
Frans Van Coetsem (April 14, 1919 - February 11, 2002) was a Belgian
(Flemish
) linguist. After an academic career in Flanders
and the Netherlands
he was appointed professor at Cornell University
in 1968, and consequently he emigrated to the USA, where, after a few years, he chose to become a naturalized American citizen.
, a small town in the southeastern part of the province of East Flanders
, on the Franco-Dutch language border
. His native language was the (Dutch) dialect
of Geraardsbergen. At a very early age he lost both his parents, and the aunt and uncle who raised him sent him to a French-language boarding school
. After finishing high school in 1939, he attended a Nivelles
“régentat” (a type of teacher training college
below university level), yet another French-language school. But he was dissatisfied with the education he was getting and in 1941 he broke it off and switched to the Catholic University of Leuven
to study Germanic philology
. (At the time “Germanic philology” included Dutch, English and German languages and literatures, as well as a number of courses in philosophy and history.) Even before graduating he worked as an interpreter for the British armed forces during the Allieds’
invasion of Germany
. He graduated in 1946; his undergraduate thesis dealt with the sounds and the morphology
of his native Geraardsbergen dialect. Less than a year later, on April 30, 1947, he married his childhood sweetheart. His Ph.D. thesis, which he defended in 1952, was also devoted to the sounds and the morphology of the Geraardsbergen dialect; his thesis supervisor was L. Grootaers.
But already before he had obtained his degree he was hired by the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal
(WNT) as a trainee editor. This meant moving to Wassenaar
, near his job in Leiden. At the WNT he was coached by K.H. Heeroma, who also assisted him in choosing the subject of his “Aggregatie voor het Hoger Onderwijs”
, which he obtained in 1956. His thesis, published by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
(KNAW) in the same year, was a significant breakthrough in the comparative
study of the Germanic
languages, and established his international reputation in the field.
In 1957 he was appointed successor to his supervisor L. Grootaers [†1956] at the Germanic Philology department of the Catholic University of Leuven, and he moved back to Belgium. But from 1963 he was also Extraordinary Professor of comparative Germanic linguistics at Leiden University
.
Cornell University invited him as visiting professor for the academic year 1965–1966. Its research facilities as well as the opportunity to teach mainly graduate students made him decide in 1968 to accept Cornell’s offer of tenure.
In Cornell he supervised a number of Ph.D. students who all went on to have academic careers. After his retirement in 1989, he remained active, supervising graduate students and continuing his research. It was mainly as an emeritus professor that he wrote his important works about language contact
, some of which were unfinished at his death and were published posthumously.
Some five years after his wife’s death—she passed away on January 26, 1993—Frans Van Coetsem was diagnosed with cancer, which was the cause of his death on February 11, 2002.
As a thesis supervisor he was anything but heavy-handed. He respected his students too much to overcorrect what they wrote, and he did not mind their taking positions with which he disagreed or their following methods that were not his. (See also § 2.2.) On the contrary, if their work was solid, he would help them improve it on their own terms. The variety of Ph.D. theses he supervised is quite remarkable.
framework in which he was working was out-of-date. Consequently he categorically refused to publish his thesis, in spite of its excellence. (2) The 1956 publication of his habilitation, highly specialist though it was, sold out fairly quickly, and the KNAW had it reprinted, unchanged, and published in 1964 without Frans Van Coetsem’s knowledge. When he eventually found out, he demanded—and obtained—that all copies still unsold be called back and that a notice be inserted to the effect that he would have wanted to modify certain parts in view of recent research.
He could get very upset at researchers whose work was not up to scratch or who used it as a means of self-promotion. But he deeply appreciated and respected serious researchers, whatever their orientation or philosophy. The history of Toward a Grammar of Proto-Germanic
is revealing in this respect. He had planned the work as a modern successor to Eduard Prokosch
’s 1939 A Comparative Germanic Grammar, and had brought together a number of distinguished historical linguists
for the purpose. However, the chapters they contributed were very diverse in nature (some were suitable for a textbook, others contributed original and advanced research) and in approach (some were clearly structuralist
, others worked within generative linguistics
). Frans Van Coetsem respected his authors and published their contributions as they were, rather than imposing a format or an approach, though that meant that the original plan had to be abandoned. The book is a series of contributions Toward a Grammar of Proto-Germanic rather than a grammar of Proto-Germanic proper.
Frans Van Coetsem's research ranged wide; his knowledge of general linguistics was vast. His own research can usefully be assigned to four subfields of linguistics.
(1) His first research—his Ph.D. and his work at the WNT—was on Dutch
, and he would work on Dutch throughout his career, focusing often on variation
within Dutch: between the Netherlands and Flanders—his 1957 article on the national border between the Netherlands and Flanders as a language border, brief though it was, was cited extensively—and between the dialects and the standard language
. He was also the linguistic expert behind a highly popular language program on the standard language that had a ten-year run (1962–1972) on Belgian (Flemish) television. His interest in language variation was to come to full fruition after his retirement; see below, (4).
(2) Frans Van Coetsem was best known as a specialist in comparative Germanic linguistics. Instead of considering Proto-Germanic undifferentiated chronologically, he realized that “Proto-Germanic” had lasted a long time and that it should be divided into periods. That insight, in combination with his knowledge of phonetics and phonology [see (3) below] led him to a classification of the Germanic strong verbs
that differs radically from the traditional one in seven classes and which explains a lot of their characteristics and evolution; cf. the title of his 1956 book (translated): ‘The system of the strong verbs and the periodization of Proto-Germanic’. An indirect consequence was a new explanation of an old crux in comparative Germanic linguistics, the so-called ē². This is a long ē that appeared in Proto-Germanic—in a later stage, according to Van Coetsem—and that differed from the long ē inherited from Proto-Indo-European
, the ē¹. (The difference is still clearly recognizable in Dutch and German: hier ‘here' goes back to Proto-Germanic *hē²r, whereas waar, wahr ‘true’, to Proto-Germanic *wē¹ra .) — All this led to his being asked to write the chapter on Proto-Germanic in the Kurzer Grundriß der germanischen Philologie bis 1500 (published in 1970) and it was probably the main reason why he was invited to Cornell. He continued to work out and refine these ideas until the end of his life; witness his 1990 and 1994 books. For more information on the latter, see Germanic Parent Language
, a term he seems to have introduced.
(3) Frans Van Coetsem was trained in phonetics
, but not in phonology
, for when he was in college, phonology was a still a very young branch of linguistics. (Both N. van Wijk’s Phonologie and Nikolai Trubetzkoy
’s Grundzüge der Phonologie were published in 1939.) But he would do outstanding work in both. He was a member of the team that made the first radiographic images involving the use of a contrast medium of the pronunciation of some standard Dutch vowels. They were taken at the institute of physiology of the Catholic University of Leuven, where he lectured in addition to teaching his courses in the department of Germanic Philology—even in the 50s he was in favor of interdisciplinarity
. He was also a co-founder of the speech therapy program at the Catholic University of Leuven. — Phonology played an important role in almost all his publications on Germanic [see (2) above], and it was the first aspect he dealt with in his studies about language contact [see (4) below]. Problems pertaining to accent, too, interested him; witness his Towards a Typology of Lexical Accent as well as the last publication he was able to see through the press himself. In that 2001 article he proposed the following explanation of the “violent contrast” between the British and the American lexical accent (cp. the three-syllable British pronunciation of necessary with the four-syllable American one). In British English
, stress is so strong that neighboring syllables are weakened or disappear altogether: it is a language with an extremely dominant accent. This is difficult for non-native speakers to imitate. America was populated by so many non-native speakers that the inadequately weakened syllables in their pronunciation ended up in the standard pronunciation of American English
.
(4) Frans Van Coetsem's interest in linguistic variation led him to an in-depth investigation of language contact. Van Coetsem clearly distinguished between borrowing, which happens, e.g., when a Dutch speaker borrows the ɡ of English goal together with the word, and imposition, which happens, e.g., when a Dutch speaker imposes his articulatory habit on English, pronouncing goal with his Dutch ɣ. This distinction seems evident, but no one had ever formulated it so clearly as Van Coetsem, nor had anyone suspected its implications. A second fundamental factor that must not be lost sight of when studying language contact is the degree of stability of a language component. E.g., the lexicon
of a language is not at all stable, whereas its morphology and syntax
are much more so. A word like save can easily be borrowed into Dutch, but hardly its morphology: the Dutch principal parts
of that borrowing are [ˈseːvən], [ˈseːvdə], [ɣəˈseːft]. In a number of publications Van Coetsem elaborated these ideas and used them to explain all kinds of contact phenomena.
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
(Flemish
Flemish people
The Flemings or Flemish are the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of Belgium, where they are mostly found in the northern region of Flanders. They are one of two principal cultural-linguistic groups in Belgium, the other being the French-speaking Walloons...
) linguist. After an academic career in Flanders
Flanders
Flanders is the community of the Flemings but also one of the institutions in Belgium, and a geographical region located in parts of present-day Belgium, France and the Netherlands. "Flanders" can also refer to the northern part of Belgium that contains Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp...
and the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
he was appointed professor at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
in 1968, and consequently he emigrated to the USA, where, after a few years, he chose to become a naturalized American citizen.
Life
Frans Van Coetsem was born on April 14, 1919 in GeraardsbergenGeraardsbergen
Geraardsbergen is a city and municipality located in the Denderstreek and in the Flemish Ardennes, the hilly southern part of the Belgian province of East Flanders. The municipality comprises the city of Geraardsbergen proper and the following towns:...
, a small town in the southeastern part of the province of East Flanders
East Flanders
East Flanders is a province of Flanders, one of the three regions of Belgium. It borders on the Netherlands and in Belgium on the provinces of Antwerp, Flemish Brabant , of Hainaut and of West Flanders...
, on the Franco-Dutch language border
Language border
A language border or language boundary is the line separating two language areas. The term is generally meant to imply a lack of mutual intelligibility between the two languages...
. His native language was the (Dutch) dialect
Dutch dialects
Dutch dialects are primarily the dialects that are both cognate with the Dutch language and are spoken in the same language area as the Dutch standard language. Dutch dialects are remarkably diverse and are found in the Netherlands and northern Belgium....
of Geraardsbergen. At a very early age he lost both his parents, and the aunt and uncle who raised him sent him to a French-language boarding school
Boarding school
A boarding school is a school where some or all pupils study and live during the school year with their fellow students and possibly teachers and/or administrators. The word 'boarding' is used in the sense of "bed and board," i.e., lodging and meals...
. After finishing high school in 1939, he attended a Nivelles
Nivelles
Nivelles is a Walloon city and municipality located in the Belgian province of Walloon Brabant. The Nivelles municipality includes the old communes of Baulers, Bornival, Thines, and Monstreux....
“régentat” (a type of teacher training college
Teacher training college
A teacher training college is a college of higher education that specialises in training students to be teachers.Many universities offer similar facilities, a number of which acquired their provision by taking over a teacher training college or by a teacher training college evolving into a...
below university level), yet another French-language school. But he was dissatisfied with the education he was getting and in 1941 he broke it off and switched to the Catholic University of Leuven
Catholic University of Leuven
The Catholic University of Leuven, or of Louvain, was the largest, oldest and most prominent university in Belgium. The university was founded in 1425 as the University of Leuven by John IV, Duke of Brabant and approved by a Papal bull by Pope Martin V.During France's occupation of Belgium in the...
to study Germanic philology
Germanic philology
Germanic philology is the philological study of the Germanic languages particularly from a comparative or historical perspective.The beginnings of research into the Germanic languages began in the 16th century, with the discovery of literary texts in the earlier phases of the languages. Early...
. (At the time “Germanic philology” included Dutch, English and German languages and literatures, as well as a number of courses in philosophy and history.) Even before graduating he worked as an interpreter for the British armed forces during the Allieds’
Allies of World War II
The Allies of World War II were the countries that opposed the Axis powers during the Second World War . Former Axis states contributing to the Allied victory are not considered Allied states...
invasion of Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. He graduated in 1946; his undergraduate thesis dealt with the sounds and the morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
of his native Geraardsbergen dialect. Less than a year later, on April 30, 1947, he married his childhood sweetheart. His Ph.D. thesis, which he defended in 1952, was also devoted to the sounds and the morphology of the Geraardsbergen dialect; his thesis supervisor was L. Grootaers.
But already before he had obtained his degree he was hired by the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal
Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal
Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal is a dictionary of the Dutch language. It has over 430,000 entries of Dutch words from 1500 to 1921 and the paper edition consists of 43 volumes and close to 50,000 pages. The dictionary was almost 150 years in the making: the first fascicle was published in...
(WNT) as a trainee editor. This meant moving to Wassenaar
Wassenaar
Wassenaar is a town in the western Netherlands, in the province of South Holland. A fairly affluent suburb of The Hague, Wassenaar lies 10 km north of that city on the N44 highway near the North Sea coast. It is part of the Haaglanden region...
, near his job in Leiden. At the WNT he was coached by K.H. Heeroma, who also assisted him in choosing the subject of his “Aggregatie voor het Hoger Onderwijs”
Habilitation
Habilitation is the highest academic qualification a scholar can achieve by his or her own pursuit in several European and Asian countries. Earned after obtaining a research doctorate, such as a PhD, habilitation requires the candidate to write a professorial thesis based on independent...
, which he obtained in 1956. His thesis, published by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is an organisation dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands...
(KNAW) in the same year, was a significant breakthrough in the comparative
Comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness....
study of the Germanic
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
languages, and established his international reputation in the field.
In 1957 he was appointed successor to his supervisor L. Grootaers [†1956] at the Germanic Philology department of the Catholic University of Leuven, and he moved back to Belgium. But from 1963 he was also Extraordinary Professor of comparative Germanic linguistics at Leiden University
Leiden University
Leiden University , located in the city of Leiden, is the oldest university in the Netherlands. The university was founded in 1575 by William, Prince of Orange, leader of the Dutch Revolt in the Eighty Years' War. The royal Dutch House of Orange-Nassau and Leiden University still have a close...
.
Cornell University invited him as visiting professor for the academic year 1965–1966. Its research facilities as well as the opportunity to teach mainly graduate students made him decide in 1968 to accept Cornell’s offer of tenure.
In Cornell he supervised a number of Ph.D. students who all went on to have academic careers. After his retirement in 1989, he remained active, supervising graduate students and continuing his research. It was mainly as an emeritus professor that he wrote his important works about language contact
Language contact
Language contact occurs when two or more languages or varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics.Multilingualism has likely been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual...
, some of which were unfinished at his death and were published posthumously.
Some five years after his wife’s death—she passed away on January 26, 1993—Frans Van Coetsem was diagnosed with cancer, which was the cause of his death on February 11, 2002.
As teacher
Frans Van Coetsem was able to hold his students’ attention, whether they numbered over two hundred, as in his introductory phonetics course at the Catholic University of Leuven, or less than a dozen, seated around the big table in his Cornell office. His lectures were well thought out, and he gave them with enthusiasm. In fact, he could argue a point with real passion, and then his blackboard was liable to look like an abstract expressionist painting—orthodox didactics was not his thing. Yet his argumentation was always limpid, and he never lost the big picture, even when a student’s question sent him off on a tangent. This often happened, for he welcomed questions: he took his students seriously. (The informality between teaching staff and students was another reason for him to move to Cornell.) He used these occasions to discuss problems that his research was focusing on and this often took his students to the outer edge of modern linguistic research.As a thesis supervisor he was anything but heavy-handed. He respected his students too much to overcorrect what they wrote, and he did not mind their taking positions with which he disagreed or their following methods that were not his. (See also § 2.2.) On the contrary, if their work was solid, he would help them improve it on their own terms. The variety of Ph.D. theses he supervised is quite remarkable.
As researcher
Frans Van Coetsem considered doing research a true if non-religious calling. What he wrote was always the result of thorough study and his carefully worded argumentation was thought through to its furthest consequences. Two incidents in his life reveal the stringent requirements he thought research imposed, and show how demanding he was in his own work. (1) While writing his Ph.D. thesis, he had gradually come to see that the neogrammarianNeogrammarian
The Neogrammarians were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change...
framework in which he was working was out-of-date. Consequently he categorically refused to publish his thesis, in spite of its excellence. (2) The 1956 publication of his habilitation, highly specialist though it was, sold out fairly quickly, and the KNAW had it reprinted, unchanged, and published in 1964 without Frans Van Coetsem’s knowledge. When he eventually found out, he demanded—and obtained—that all copies still unsold be called back and that a notice be inserted to the effect that he would have wanted to modify certain parts in view of recent research.
He could get very upset at researchers whose work was not up to scratch or who used it as a means of self-promotion. But he deeply appreciated and respected serious researchers, whatever their orientation or philosophy. The history of Toward a Grammar of Proto-Germanic
Proto-Germanic language
Proto-Germanic , or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all the Germanic languages, such as modern English, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Luxembourgish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and Swedish.The Proto-Germanic language is...
is revealing in this respect. He had planned the work as a modern successor to Eduard Prokosch
Eduard Prokosch
Eduard Prokosch, was a historical linguist who specialized in Indo-European and, specifically, Proto-Germanic studies. He was the father of Frederic Prokosch....
’s 1939 A Comparative Germanic Grammar, and had brought together a number of distinguished historical linguists
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
for the purpose. However, the chapters they contributed were very diverse in nature (some were suitable for a textbook, others contributed original and advanced research) and in approach (some were clearly structuralist
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
, others worked within generative linguistics
Generative linguistics
Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. The term "generative grammar" is used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different, though overlapping,...
). Frans Van Coetsem respected his authors and published their contributions as they were, rather than imposing a format or an approach, though that meant that the original plan had to be abandoned. The book is a series of contributions Toward a Grammar of Proto-Germanic rather than a grammar of Proto-Germanic proper.
Frans Van Coetsem's research ranged wide; his knowledge of general linguistics was vast. His own research can usefully be assigned to four subfields of linguistics.
(1) His first research—his Ph.D. and his work at the WNT—was on Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, and he would work on Dutch throughout his career, focusing often on variation
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society...
within Dutch: between the Netherlands and Flanders—his 1957 article on the national border between the Netherlands and Flanders as a language border, brief though it was, was cited extensively—and between the dialects and the standard language
Standard language
A standard language is a language variety used by a group of people in their public discourse. Alternatively, varieties become standard by undergoing a process of standardization, during which it is organized for description in grammars and dictionaries and encoded in such reference works...
. He was also the linguistic expert behind a highly popular language program on the standard language that had a ten-year run (1962–1972) on Belgian (Flemish) television. His interest in language variation was to come to full fruition after his retirement; see below, (4).
(2) Frans Van Coetsem was best known as a specialist in comparative Germanic linguistics. Instead of considering Proto-Germanic undifferentiated chronologically, he realized that “Proto-Germanic” had lasted a long time and that it should be divided into periods. That insight, in combination with his knowledge of phonetics and phonology [see (3) below] led him to a classification of the Germanic strong verbs
Germanic strong verb
In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is one which marks its past tense by means of ablaut. In English, these are verbs like sing, sang, sung...
that differs radically from the traditional one in seven classes and which explains a lot of their characteristics and evolution; cf. the title of his 1956 book (translated): ‘The system of the strong verbs and the periodization of Proto-Germanic’. An indirect consequence was a new explanation of an old crux in comparative Germanic linguistics, the so-called ē². This is a long ē that appeared in Proto-Germanic—in a later stage, according to Van Coetsem—and that differed from the long ē inherited from Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
, the ē¹. (The difference is still clearly recognizable in Dutch and German: hier ‘here' goes back to Proto-Germanic *hē²r, whereas waar, wahr ‘true’, to Proto-Germanic *wē¹ra .) — All this led to his being asked to write the chapter on Proto-Germanic in the Kurzer Grundriß der germanischen Philologie bis 1500 (published in 1970) and it was probably the main reason why he was invited to Cornell. He continued to work out and refine these ideas until the end of his life; witness his 1990 and 1994 books. For more information on the latter, see Germanic Parent Language
Germanic Parent Language
Germanic Parent Language is a term used in historical linguistics to describe the chain of reconstructed languages in the Germanic group referred to as Pre-Germanic Indo-European , Early Proto-Germanic , and Late Proto-Germanic . It is intended to cover the time of the 2nd and 1st millennia BC...
, a term he seems to have introduced.
(3) Frans Van Coetsem was trained in phonetics
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...
, but not in phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
, for when he was in college, phonology was a still a very young branch of linguistics. (Both N. van Wijk’s Phonologie and Nikolai Trubetzkoy
Nikolai Trubetzkoy
Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology...
’s Grundzüge der Phonologie were published in 1939.) But he would do outstanding work in both. He was a member of the team that made the first radiographic images involving the use of a contrast medium of the pronunciation of some standard Dutch vowels. They were taken at the institute of physiology of the Catholic University of Leuven, where he lectured in addition to teaching his courses in the department of Germanic Philology—even in the 50s he was in favor of interdisciplinarity
Interdisciplinarity
Interdisciplinarity involves the combining of two or more academic fields into one single discipline. An interdisciplinary field crosses traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought, as new needs and professions have emerged....
. He was also a co-founder of the speech therapy program at the Catholic University of Leuven. — Phonology played an important role in almost all his publications on Germanic [see (2) above], and it was the first aspect he dealt with in his studies about language contact [see (4) below]. Problems pertaining to accent, too, interested him; witness his Towards a Typology of Lexical Accent as well as the last publication he was able to see through the press himself. In that 2001 article he proposed the following explanation of the “violent contrast” between the British and the American lexical accent (cp. the three-syllable British pronunciation of necessary with the four-syllable American one). In British English
British English
British English, or English , is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere...
, stress is so strong that neighboring syllables are weakened or disappear altogether: it is a language with an extremely dominant accent. This is difficult for non-native speakers to imitate. America was populated by so many non-native speakers that the inadequately weakened syllables in their pronunciation ended up in the standard pronunciation of American English
American English
American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....
.
(4) Frans Van Coetsem's interest in linguistic variation led him to an in-depth investigation of language contact. Van Coetsem clearly distinguished between borrowing, which happens, e.g., when a Dutch speaker borrows the ɡ of English goal together with the word, and imposition, which happens, e.g., when a Dutch speaker imposes his articulatory habit on English, pronouncing goal with his Dutch ɣ. This distinction seems evident, but no one had ever formulated it so clearly as Van Coetsem, nor had anyone suspected its implications. A second fundamental factor that must not be lost sight of when studying language contact is the degree of stability of a language component. E.g., the lexicon
Lexicon
In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...
of a language is not at all stable, whereas its morphology and syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
are much more so. A word like save can easily be borrowed into Dutch, but hardly its morphology: the Dutch principal parts
Principal parts
In language learning, the principal parts of a verb are those forms that a student must memorize in order to be able to conjugate the verb through all its forms.- English :...
of that borrowing are [ˈseːvən], [ˈseːvdə], [ɣəˈseːft]. In a number of publications Van Coetsem elaborated these ideas and used them to explain all kinds of contact phenomena.
Honors
- In 1964 Frans Van Coetsem was elected “Korrespondierendes Mitglied in Übersee für den Wissenschaftlichen Rat des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache” in MannheimMannheimMannheim is a city in southwestern Germany. With about 315,000 inhabitants, Mannheim is the second-largest city in the Bundesland of Baden-Württemberg, following the capital city of Stuttgart....
, which he remained until 1997, when he resigned. - On April 14, 1970, he was installed as a foreign correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences Division.
- In 1976 he was invited by the University of ViennaUniversity of ViennaThe University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world...
as visiting professor, to teach a course on Proto-Germanic and one on the neogrammarian, structuralist and generative approaches to historical linguistics. - He was invited by the Meertens Instituut in Amsterdam (a research institute of the KNAW) to give the keynote address at a colloquium about dialect and the standard language from October 15 through 18, 1990. His 1992 article is an expanded version of his address.
Sources
Apart from what is in the Notes, the data of this article are taken from Van Coetsem’s publications and from the six In Memoriams published about Frans Van Coetsem. All electronic sources mentioned in this article were retrieved in the spring of 2010.- Buccini, Anthony F. “In memoriam Frans van Coetsem” Journal of Germanic Linguistics 15.3 (2003) pp. 267–276
- Buccini, Anthony, James Gair, Wayne Harbert & John Wolff [Untitled In Memoriam] Memorial Statements of the Faculty 2001-2002 (Cornell University)
- Leys, Odo “In memoriam Frans van Coetsem (1919–2002)” Leuvense Bijdragen 91 (2002) pp. 1–2
- Muysken, P.C. “Frans Camille Cornelis van Coetsem” Levensberichten en herdenkingen 2005 (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen) pp. 32–35, available here
- Schaerlaekens, Annemarie “In memoriam Frans Van Coetsem (1919–2002)” L&A Alumni Logopedie en Audiologie (K.U.Leuven, 1992) nr. 3, p. 3; available here
- Tollenaere, F. de “In memoriam Frans van Coetsem” Jaarverslag 2002 (Leiden: Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie) p. 6