In Memoriam

'Aawokw Aileen Figuroa and Jimmie James, 2006

Leslie and Anna, England, early 2000s

Cal Watkins at home in Los Angeles

Vina Smith (photo by Florrine Super)

To quote Eve Baird (Berkeley native Rebecca Romijn) on The Librarians: "An institution is only as good as the people in it." These are some of the colleagues, mentors, and students who I've lost. I wish I'd had more time with them.

• 'Aawokw Aileen Figueroa (1912-2008) was the first Native elder to welcome me to her house, and the Yurok elder I worked with most. She was kind, generous, and patient; she spoke her language beautifully, and was so sensitive to how it sounded. It made me happy and proud whenever I happened to say things right; her eyes would open wide in pleasure and surprise. I wish I'd spent more time asking Aileen about things other than language. What I said at her memorial is here. Among the elders I was privileged to learn about the Yurok language from, Aileen was also the first to pass away, followed by 'aawokw Georgiana Trull and Glenn Moore, Sr. (in 2008), Ollie Foseide and Jimmie James (in 2009), and Archie Thompson (in 2013).
• I met Anna Morpurgo Davies (1937-2014) in 1990 when she visited Harvard for a lecture series; we got to be friends when she taught at Berkeley, several times, beginning in 2000. Over the years, Leslie and I visited Anna in Oxford as often as we could, shared many dinners and long talks in Berkeley, and had the most delicious artichokes ever when we stayed with her in Rome. She taught me how to cook fennel; in return, one day we also almost killed her in Death Valley when it seemed good to go on a long uphill hike in 100-degree weather. I treasured our late-night conversations, fortified by tea, about colleagues, work, and the history of linguistics. Everything Anna wrote is quite brilliant and completely worth reading; maybe her greatest works are "Hittite hieroglyphs and Luwian: New evidence for the connection" (1974), Nineteenth-century linguistics (1998), and A companion to Linear B: Mycenaean Greek texts and their world (2008-2011), but you should also read her obituary of her friend Henry Hoenigswald as well as her unbelievably moving Holocaust Memorial Day reminiscences. My life as a scholarly person has been far emptier since she left.
• Calvert Watkins (1933-2013) was my first historical linguistics teacher. On the first day of Indo-European class, in September 1982, he told us about internal reconstruction of Japanese based on the names of subway stops in Tokyo. Later that fall, when I turned in homework late with an abject apology, he wrote: "Never apologize, it's a sign of weakness. – John Wayne." Over the years Cal taught me Hittite and Indo-European, but more importantly I learned how to read texts philologically, how to think about language in texts, and how linguistics and Indo-European studies are interwoven; and I saw what it was like to love the linguistic world you work with. In a rich, imaginative oeuvre, a few of Cal's scholarly works that have made a difference to me are Indo-European origins of the Celtic verb I: The sigmatic aorist (1963), "Preliminaries to a historical and comparative analysis of the syntax of the Old Irish verb" (1963), "Hittite and Indo-European studies: The denominative statives in -ē-" (1971), "Sick-maintenance in Indo-European" (1976), and "The language of the Trojans" (1986). And everybody should have a copy of the American Heritage dictionary of Indo-European roots (3rd edn. 2011).
• Candace Cardinal (1969-2016), a student in my first undergraduate class at Berkeley (Linguistics 115, 1996), was sui generis—passionate about everything, including language, always thinking on her own. Once she told me it was the sense of a connection to tradition in our graduation ceremony that made her feel she should go to graduate school. She spent time as a UC Santa Cruz graduate student; afterwards, I lost touch with her except through social media, where I admired her energy and creativity, and was so happy for the family she loved. When depression took Candace it cut a hole in the world.
• Corinne Crawford (1980-2007) was writing an excellently original dissertation on language and identity in ancient Italy, in the Berkeley Classics Department; among other things, she had discovered how the geography of Oscan inscriptions at Pompeii casts light on the social dynamics in that city. When she was my student I knew how intellectually creative she was, but it wasn't until after she was killed by a car, while bicycling, that I understood how far Corinne's creativity and generosity extended throughout her life. (Here's Corinne's account of a conversation with Anna Morpurgo Davies, and here's what I said at her memorial.)
• Gary Holland (1943-2019) was a selfless public citizen at Cal for five decades, serving as graduate adviser in Linguistics, Secretary of the faculty Senate, and director of the Celtic Studies Program, among other gigs. His metrical edition of the Rig Veda (1995, with Barend Van Nooten) is fundamental for one of the most important and complex texts in any early Indo-European language. I admired how grounded all his Indo-Europeanist work was in texts, and how he moved from syntax (at a time when few Indo-Europeanists had a typological perspective on the field) to discourse and poetics.
• Susan Guion Anderson (1966-2011) took my first graduate historical linguistics class at the University of Texas in 1991, and was my first graduate advisee. Funny, quirky, and inquisitive, she taught me about Texas German syntax (partly based on family fieldwork) and did wonderful work, avant la lettre, studying lexical effects on frequency in sound change. Susan went on to a postdoc at Alabama and a faculty position at Oregon, where her work on acquisition, bilingualism, and phonetics made her a leader. I admired her for two decades and wish I had told her how proud she made me. (When I left Texas in 1995 Björn Lindblom became her advisor; after Björn left, Nicola Bessell was her final PhD dissertation chair.)
• Vina Smith (1925-2015) taught me the most about Karuk. In her house I also started to learn (what so many people already knew) that language work is about people — caring for a language is caring for the people who treasure it. Her loss came as one of a sad series of losses of elder speakers of Karuk passing from the world, including Charlie Thom, Sr. (in 2013) and Lucille Albers (in 2014). What I wrote for Vina's memorial is here.