Marvin Lionel Bender was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 author and co-author of several books, publications and essays regarding African languages

African languages

There are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families:*Afro-Asiatic spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel...

, particularly from Ethiopia

Ethiopia

Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...

 and Sudan

Sudan

Sudan , officially the Republic of the Sudan , is a country in North Africa, sometimes considered part of the Middle East politically. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the...

. He retired from Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Southern Illinois University Carbondale is a public research university located in Carbondale, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1869, SIUC is the flagship campus of the Southern Illinois University system...

. He did extensive work in all four language families of Ethiopia

Languages of Ethiopia

There are 90 individual languages of Ethiopia according to Ethnologue . Most belong to the Afro-Asiatic language family , with Nilo-Saharan languages also spoken by the nation's Nilotic ethnic minorities.Charles A...

: Semitic

Semitic

In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages...

, Cushitic, Omotic, Nilo-Saharan. Together with J. Donald Bowen,
Robert L. Cooper, and Charles A. Ferguson

Charles A. Ferguson

Charles Albert Ferguson was a U.S. linguist who taught at Stanford University. He was one the founders of sociolinguistics and is best known for his work on diglossia. The TOEFL test was created under his leadership at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC...

, he carried out the Survey of Language Use and Language Teaching in East Africa, sponsored by the Ford Foundation

Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation is a private foundation incorporated in Michigan and based in New York City created to fund programs that were chartered in 1936 by Edsel Ford and Henry Ford....

 in 1968-1970. He later performed other research sponsored by the National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

.

Among other works, his books include Amharic Verb Morphology (his PhD dissertation - a generative

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,...

 study of Amharic

Amharic language

Amharic is a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia. It is the second most-spoken Semitic language in the world, after Arabic, and the official working language of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Thus, it has official status and is used nationwide. Amharic is also the official or working...

 verbal morphology), Language in Ethiopia (co-edited with C. Ferguson, C. Bowen, R. Cooper), Nilo-Saharan Language Studies, The Non-Semitic Languages of Ethiopia, Preliminary Gaam-English-Gaam Dictionary, Omotic Verb Morphology, and the Berta Lexicon. For many years, he was closely involved with NACAL, the annual North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics

North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics

North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics is a yearly academic conference addressing the Afroasiatic languages. The conference has been held since 1973. Prominent participants have included Lionel Bender, Wolf Leslau, and Alan S. Kaye....

.

Life

Bender was born August 18, 1934, in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania

Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania

Mechanicsburg is a borough in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, USA, eight miles west of Harrisburg. It is part of the Harrisburg–Carlisle Metropolitan Statistical Area. Mechanicsburg was settled in 1806 and incorporated as a borough on April 12, 1828...

. Bender travelled throughout the world, particularly in Northeast Africa, and was an accomplished chess

Chess

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

 player. Dr. Bender died of complications from a stroke

Stroke

A stroke, previously known medically as a cerebrovascular accident , is the rapidly developing loss of brain function due to disturbance in the blood supply to the brain. This can be due to ischemia caused by blockage , or a hemorrhage...

 and brain hemorrhage on February 19, 2008 in Cape Girardeau

Cape Girardeau, Missouri

Cape Girardeau is a city located in Cape Girardeau and Scott counties in Southeast Missouri in the United States. It is located approximately southeast of St. Louis and north of Memphis. As of the 2010 census, the city's population was 37,941. A college town, it is the home of Southeast Missouri...

, Missouri

Missouri

Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...

.

Works

• 1968: Amharic Verb Morphology: A Generative Approach. University of Texas.
• 1975. Omotic: a new Afroasiatic language family. (University Museum Series, 3.) Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University.
• 1976: (et al.) Language in Ethiopia. London: Oxford University Press.
• 1976: (ed.) The Non-Semitic Languages of Ethiopia. East Lansing, Michigan: African Studies Center, Michigan State University.
• 1980: (with: Malik Agaar Ayre) Preliminary Gaam-English-Gaam Dictionary. Carbondale, IL: Dept. of Linguistics, Southern Illinois University.
• 1981: (ed.) Peoples and Cultures of the Ethio-Sudan Borderlands. East Lansing, Michigan: African Studies Center, Michigan State University.
• 1981: (with: Thilo C. Schadeberg, eds.) Nilo-Saharan. Dordrecht, Holland & Cinnaminson, NJ: Foris.
• 1983: (ed.) Nilo-Saharan Language Studies. East Lansing, Michigan: African Studies Center, Michigan State University.
• 2000. Comparative Morphology of the Omotic Languages. Munich: LINCOM.