Winfred P. Lehmann was an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
linguist noted for his work in
historical linguisticsHistorical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
, particularly
Proto-Indo-EuropeanThe Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
and
Proto-GermanicProto-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...
, as well as for pioneering work in
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...
.
Biography
After receiving
B.A.A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...
in Humanities at the
Northwestern CollegeThis article deals with the WELS-affiliated tertiary institution in Minnesota. See Luther College for the ELCA institution in Iowa.Martin Luther College is the college of ministry operated by the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod...
in Watertown in 1936, he went on to receive his
M.A.A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
from the
University of Wisconsin–MadisonThe University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...
in 1938 and a
Ph.D.Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
in 1941, both in
Germanic philologyGermanic 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 University of Wisconsin.
Early in his career, during
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps as Officer-in-Charge of the
Japaneseis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
Language School and Japanese instructor. After the war he became Assistant Professor in the Department of
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
at Washington University, and was recruited in 1949 to the
University of Texas at AustinThe University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...
as an Associate Professor of Germanic Linguistics. He was promoted to a Full Professor in 1951, and chaired that department from 1953 to 1964. He was largely responsible for developing that program into the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas, and served as its first Chair, in the period 1964–1972.
Awards and honors
He received
Fulbright Research FellowshipThe Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright-Hays Program, is a program of competitive, merit-based grants for international educational exchange for students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists and artists, founded by United States Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946. Under the...
to
NorwayNorway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
in 1950–51, and a
Guggenheim FellowshipGuggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
in 1972–73. He served as Director of the Georgetown English Language Program in
AnkaraAnkara is the capital of Turkey and the country's second largest city after Istanbul. The city has a mean elevation of , and as of 2010 the metropolitan area in the entire Ankara Province had a population of 4.4 million....
,
TurkeyTurkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
in 1955–56, as Chairman of the Linguistics Delegation to the
People's Republic of ChinaChina , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
in 1974, and as Co-Chairman of the Commission on Humanities and Social Sciences to the People's Republic of China in 1981. He was elected President of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1964. He is the only person to have served as both the President of the
Linguistic Society of AmericaThe Linguistic Society of America is a professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1924 to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The LSA has over 5,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. It works to advance the discipline and to communicate...
, in 1973, and the
Modern Language AssociationThe Modern Language Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature...
of America, in 1987.
Upon his retirement in 1986, scholars from
Western EuropeWestern Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...
, the
Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
and the U.S. gathered at the University of Texas to honor him at an IREX Conference on Linguistic Reconstruction. The volume which grew from this conference,
Reconstructing Languages and Cultures (1992, edited by
Edgar Charles PoloméEdgar Charles Polomé was a Belgian Indo-Europeanist, and professor of comparative religions and languages at the University of Texas. He studied at the Free University of Brussels from 1938, specializing in Germanic philology....
and Werner Winter), points to the worldwide impact of Lehmann's work on Indo-European and historical linguistics.
Lehmann was also honored by two other
FestschriftIn academia, a Festschrift , is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during his or her lifetime. The term, borrowed from German, could be translated as celebration publication or celebratory writing...
s, in 1977 and in 1999.
Work and legacy
Beside being responsible for launching two extremely successful departments at the University of Texas, he is also credited for the establishment of the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as the Director from 1961 until his death.
His well-known books on Proto-Indo-European and historical linguistics include:
- 1952 Proto-Indo-European Phonology. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press and Linguistic Society of America. ISBN 0-292-73341-0. (2005-07. Online version.)
- 1962 Historical Linguistics. (3rd ed. 1992) London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-07243-3.
- 1967 A Reader in Nineteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-34840-4. (2005-07. Online version.)
- 1974 Proto-Indo-European Syntax. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-76419-7. (2005-07. Online version.)
- 1986 A Gothic Etymological Dictionary, Leiden: Brill. ISBN 90-94-08176-3
- 1993 Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-08201-3.
- 2002 Pre-Indo-European. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man. ISBN 0-941694-82-8.
An important contribution was his
Proto-Indo-European Syntax, the first and one of the few existing treatments of Proto-Indo-European syntax in a
generativeIn theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
framework.
In his last book (2002), he assembled extensive data from the nominal and verbal systems, from the lexicon,
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...
, and
syntaxIn linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
of the ancient IE languages, to argue that
Pre-Indo-EuropeanThe Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
was active/stative in alignment, rather than nominative/accusative. With Gamkrelidze and
IvanovVyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov is a prominent Soviet/Russian philologist and Indo-Europeanist probably best known for his glottalic theory of Indo-European consonantism and for placing the Indo-European urheimat in the area of the Armenian Highlands and Lake Urmia.-Early life:Vyacheslav Ivanov's...
, Lehmann accounted for the similarity of the IE middle and perfect paradigms to the
HittiteHittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
hi-conjugation by postulating an ancient stative ancestor for all three.
He authored over 50 books and special issues of journals as well as 250 scholarly articles. In the period 1951–1986 he directed approximately fifty doctoral dissertations. Since 1986 he was Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the UT-Austin.
His wife, Ruth Preston Miller Lehmann (died in 2000), was also a distinguished historical linguist.
External links