Fred Lukoff (November 12, 1920 - August 13, 2000) was an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
linguistLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
who specialized in the study of the
Korean languageKorean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
and was the first president of the International Association for Korean
Language EducationLanguage education is the teaching and learning of a foreign or second language. Language education is a branch of applied linguistics.- Need for language education :...
(IAKLE).
A student of
Zellig HarrisZellig Sabbettai Harris was a renowned American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language...
, with whom he wrote "The phonemes of Kingwana-
SwahiliSwahili or Kiswahili is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique, including the Comoro Islands. It is also spoken by ethnic minority groups in Somalia...
" in 1942, Lukoff received his bachelor's degree from the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
in 1947, his master's from the same institution in 1948, and his doctorate, also from Penn, in 1954. After receiving his Ph.D., he joined the MIT
Research Laboratory of ElectronicsThe Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded in 1946 as the successor to the famed MIT Radiation Laboratory of World War II....
the same year as
Noam ChomskyAvram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
to work on
machine translationMachine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.On a basic...
under
Victor YngveVictor Yngve is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Chicago. He was one of the earliest researchers in computational linguistics and natural language processing, the use of computers to analyze and process languages...
, where, in 1956, he wrote a seminal paper on generative
phonologyPhonology 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...
, "On accent and juncture in English," with
ChomskyAvram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
and
Morris HalleMorris Halle , is a Latvian-American Jewish linguist and an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
. He taught at
Yonsei UniversityYonsei University is a Christian private research university, located in Seoul, South Korea. Established in 1885, it is one of the oldest universities in South Korea, the top private comprehensive universities in South Korea, and is widely regarded as one of the top three comprehensive...
in
SeoulSeoul , officially the Seoul Special City, is the capital and largest metropolis of South Korea. A megacity with a population of over 10 million, it is the largest city proper in the OECD developed world...
for the next seven years, and spent the rest of his career at the
University of WashingtonUniversity of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...
in Seattle until his retirement in 1989.
Lukoff wrote several textbooks for non-native speakers learning Korean, including
An Introductory Course in Korean,
Spoken Korean, and
A First Reader in Korean Writing in Mixed Script.