National Academies Press: OpenBook

Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89 (2007)

Chapter: HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD

« Previous: CHARLES F. HOCKETT
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 180
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 181
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 182
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 183
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 184
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 185
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 186
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 187
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 188
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 189
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 190
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 191
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 192
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 193
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 194
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 195
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 196
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 197
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 198
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 199
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 200
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 201
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 202
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 203
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 204
Suggested Citation:"HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD ." National Academy of Sciences. 2007. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12042.
×
Page 205

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD April 17, 1915–June 16, 2003 BY GEORGE CARDONA H ENRY M. HOENIGSWALD, professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, died on June 16, 2003, in Haverford, Pennsylvania. Henry began his career as a classicist. He contributed articles on Etruscan and Latin and important studies in Greek phonology, morphology, and metrics, the last of which he completed just before his death. He was, in addition, a well-versed Indo-Europeanist and contributed to Indo-Iranian linguistics; further, during the Second World War, he was engaged in modern Indo- Aryan and produced a handbook of Hindustani. Henry’s greatest contributions to linguistics, however, are of a more general theoretical nature. He was a major figure in seek- ing to understand and clarify the principles that underlie great work in historical-comparative linguistics, especially as practiced by the nineteenth-century neogrammarians and their successors. Henry contributed fundamental studies in these areas, including an early article on sound change and its relation to linguistic structure, a basic study of the pro- cedures followed in phonological reconstruction, an equally fundamental study of internal reconstruction, and a defini- tive monograph on language change and linguistic recon- struction. 181

182 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS Henry—named Heinrich Max Franz Hönigswald at birth—was born on April 17, 1915, in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), into an academic family, the son / of Richard Hönigswald, an eminent professor of philoso- phy at the University of Breslau. Henry received a tradi- tional education at the Johannes-Gymnasium in Breslau and, after his father moved to the University of Munich, at the Humanistische Gymnasium in Munich, which he entered in May 1930 and from which he graduated with honor and distinction in the spring of 1932. He went on to study at the University of Munich, where from 1932 to 1933 he pur- sued studies in the Department of Humanities, working with such scholars as Eva Fiesel, an authority on Etruscan, and the renowned Indo-Europeanist Ferdinand Sommer. The latter was also a friend of the Hönigswald family. Henry became interested in the classics, Indo-European, and linguistics at an early age. Years later he reminisced (1980, p. 23) about how his interest in these areas was first aroused: My story is very different. I suppose I was a fairly typical product of German secondary education. We had a Greek teacher who must have had a course in Indo-European and who taught us some of the things he knew. I bought Kiecker’s Historical Greek Grammar (“Sammlung Göschen”1) and one birthday I got Brugmann’s Kurze vergleichende Grammatik. Since then I knew I wanted to be a classicist or, even better, a linguist. As was true for many scholars of that time, Henry’s family was subjected to the dictates of German Nazism. His father was nominally a convert to Christianity (his mother died when Henry was only six)—and Henry was confirmed in the evangelical church, but these were formalities to en- sure tenure at a university and a place in civil society for an intellectual family that was ancestrally Jewish—though they rejected all religion and superstition—in a place in Ger-

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 183 many (Silesia) that was quite intolerant of Jews. For this ancestry they paid a price. In 1930 Richard Hönigswald shifted from Breslau to the University of Munich, but by 1933, Jews were forbidden to attend German universities, so that Henry then began a period of scholarly wandering. He went first to Switzerland, where from 1933 to 1934 he studied in Zurich with the classicist and Indo-Europeanist Manu Leumann and was a fellow student of the Hellenist Ernst Risch, with whom he maintained a lifelong friend- ship. In the fall of 1934 Henry moved to Italy, where he continued his studies at the University of Padua and in the summer of 1935 passed an intermediate examination, again with honor and distinction. He proceeded to work on a doctoral thesis on Greek word formation while completing a preparatory paper on the relationship between Sanskrit and Avestan. When his mentor, Giacomo Devoto, moved from Padua to Florence, Henry followed and received his doctorate (D.Litt. summa cum laude) in 1936 from the University of Florence, with a dissertation on the history of Greek word formation (Geschichte der griechischen Wortbildung), a work that to my knowledge has never been published. He went on to receive the perfezionamento, a research degree, from the same university in 1937. From 1936 to 1938 he held his first academic appointment, as a staff member in the Istituto di Studi Etruschi, Florence. Politics then intervened once more. Foreigners who had come to Italy after 1918 were obliged to leave the country, so that Henry could not remain in Florence for the winter semester of 1938-1939; he moved back to his family in Munich. On March 26, 1939, Henry left Bavaria for Switzerland in the company of his father, stepmother, and sister, taking refuge in Braunwald in Glarus in preparation for going to the United States. However, Henry was not included in the family permit for departure and had to remain behind. On

184 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS September 22 he finally obtained passage on a ship from Genoa and arrived in New York in October 1939. These early experiences left deep impressions, and in later years both Henry and his wife were devoted to the cause of hu- man and civil rights and were active members of local and national organizations supporting these rights. In the United States Henry at first continued a life of scholarly peregrination. Between 1939 and 1948 he held positions as research assistant, lecturer, and instructor at Yale University—where he was research assistant to Edgar Sturtevant—the Hartford Seminary, Hunter College, and the University of Pennsylvania, then associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin (1947-1948), in addition to a one-year stint (1946-1947) in the Foreign Service Insti- tute of the U.S. Department of State. During this time, in 1944, Henry married Gabriele (“Gabi”) Schöpflich, herself an accomplished classicist, whom he had met years earlier while they were both students in Munich. Gabi died in 2001. In 1948 Henry joined the University of Pennsylvania, succeeding Roland Grubb Kent. Promoted to the rank of full professor in 1959, he made Penn his academic home for the remainder of his career, though he was invited to and visited several other universities in the United States (University of Michigan, Georgetown—where he held the Collitz Professorship in the Linguistic Institute in 1955— Princeton, Yale), in Europe (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; St. John’s College, Oxford; University of Kiel); and in India (Deccan College, Poona [now Pune]). During his long and distinguished tenure at Penn, Henry was the major force in strengthening the linguistics department, founded by Zellig S. Harris, which he served as chair from 1963 to 1970 and cochair from 1978 to 1979; he remained a Nestor for the department long after.

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 185 In America Henry interacted with many major scholars who had a strong influence on his thinking and work. He also encountered “innumerable new things to learn” (1980, p. 25), such as articulatory phonetics, phonemics, and the anthropological approach to linguistics. Of paramount im- portance for a young scholar coming from his background, there was the feeling of freedom and exposure to new vistas accompanying this. Henry put it well when he said: In 1939—half a year after Sapir’s death—I found myself at Yale as Sturtevant’s research assistant. Quite aside from the inextricable connection (for me) with my escape to personal freedom, I wish I could convey the headiness of the experience—no amount of picture painting of my Old-World inter-war background as I have attempted it can describe it. Henry received his share of deserved honors. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1971, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974, and the National Academy of Sciences in 1988. He was elected a corresponding fellow of the British Academy in 1986, and was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behav- ioral Sciences (1962-1963) as well as a Guggenheim fellow in 1950. He was also elected president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1958 and the American Oriental Soci- ety in 1966. In addition, Henry received the Henry Allen Moe Prize of the American Philosophical Society in 1991. He also received honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (L.H.D. in 1988) and Swarthmore College (L.H.D. in 1981). Upon his retirement in 1985 Henry was honored by colleagues and friends with a felicitation vol- ume, published two years later (Cardona and Zide, 1987) and in 1986 the American Oriental Society dedicated a num- ber of its journal to Henry. Several threads are discernible in Henry’s work, and he felt the need to express himself (1980, p. 27) on how he would “like to think that the various different tasks which I

186 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS have tackled over the years and which keep me busy now, somehow hang together, however much each one of them may have depended on inevitable accident.” To begin with, there is the philology; various papers dealing with topics in Etruscan, Greek, and Latin, as well as a smaller number of articles treating issues in Indo-Iranian and Sanskrit. To a very large extent, however, what motivates these studies is an underlying quest for generalization: methods and prin- ciples governing how languages change over time and how one goes about reconstructing an ancestral protolanguage. The need to find these principles and to make explicit the methods followed in historical and comparative linguistics occupied him throughout his career. Henry mentioned (1980, p. 24) his early preoccupation with such issues, including his wish that comparative evidence be presented “upward in time as inference, and not downward as history.”2 The close attention to principles and methods also led Henry to be involved closely with the history of the field to which he contributed. He was particularly careful to distinguish be- tween the concrete work that such giants of nineteenth- century Indo-European linguistics as Karl Brugmann and Jacob Wackernagel carried out and the theoretical “preach- ments,” as he occasionally called them,3 of August Leskien, Brugmann, and others. This attention to methods and the history of his field complemented Henry’s interest, in his later years, in the related area of cladistics (Hoenigswald and Wiener, 1987). In view of Henry’s constant preoccupation throughout his professional life with methodology and procedures for reconstruction—he went so far as to speak on occasion of algorighms4—Language Change and Linguistic Reconstruc- tion may justifiably be considered his major work. This mono- graph is certainly the principal recapitulation of thinking that went back to his very early years, results of which Henry

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 187 published in a series of articles (1944, 1946, 1950), the earliest of which appeared when he was not yet 30 years old. In accordance with the only procedure he thought proper—namely, presenting historical materials “upward in time as inference, and not downward as history” for pur- poses of reconstruction—Henry did not follow here the cus- tom observed in the usual textbooks on the subject. It is noteworthy, for example, that he did not begin with any discussion about the regularity of sound change5 or use Proto-Indo-European constructs and Grimm’s and Verner’s laws as illustration; moreover, the great majority of examples used to illustrate procedures and principles are from such well-attested languages as English, Latin, and Romance lan- guages.6 He also diverged from the usual practice by deal- ing first with morphological change and only later with sound change. It is only after treating grammar and semantics, ending with a chapter (7, pp. 68-71) on the reconstruction of grammatical and semantic features, that he proceeds to treat sound change and the comparative method with re- spect to phonology and its reconstruction. In all this, Henry was rigorously formal and, it is im- portant to emphasize, treated changes in terms of distribu- tion, saying, for example (1960, p. 15), “Note that these four classes are defined entirely by their distribution of the segments A and B—and they may or may not have other distinguishing characteristics.” While dealing with the dis- tribution of elements, both phonological and morphologi- cal, he made use also of what he called “nil” and symbol- ized Ø.7 Further, nil could be a primitive, not merely an absence due to loss. Thus, for example, while illustrating unconditioned sound loss with the example of early Latin hortus (garden), which in later Latin has no h-, Henry op- erates not only with the change h > Ø but also with a change Ø > Ø, as in ortus (risen), which lacked any initial conso-

188 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS nant in both early and late Latin. He notes in this context, “in fact, any conveniently assumed number of Ø’s may be posited as occurring between any two segmental phonemes found in sequence. Thus, the environment of Ø in English includes t—i,# —t, but not #— .” This emphasis on distri- bution went beyond phonology and morphology to include semantic change. Accordingly, Henry notes (1960, p. 45), The phrase “semantic change” or “change of meaning” is properly applied to morphs; if a morph at a later stage appears otherwise than as a part of a corresponding morpheme—if, in other words, it has changed its morphe- mic environment—it is quite rightly said to have changed its meaning. Thus avunculus, ce ace-cheek, flesh, meat, taken as morphs (i.e., identified ¯ phonemically) have all undergone semantic change. Earlier in the same work (1960, p. 29) the approach in question is made more explicit in a section entitled “One- to-One Replacement by Existing Morphs (Semantic Change),” in which are charted possible environments (I, II, III, IV) for old English wonge (cheek) and ce ace (jaw) and their ¯ modern English counterparts, respectively cheek and jaw. This formal approach could appear deceptively simple, as when Henry dealt with what he called the principal step in comparative grammar in a remarkably short compass (1950).8 Henry’s consistent probing into the methods and prin- ciples underlying concrete work in historical linguistics was also colored by a healthy skepticism. It is typical, for ex- ample, that the title of his contribution to a volume on universals (Hoenigswald, 1966) is a question, that he does not simply assume there are given universals merely to be exemplified. It is also typical of Henry’s nature that he ends this essay with a view to the future, noting that transforma- tional grammar “may also bring new principles of impor- tance to an understanding of the universals of change.”

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 189 Henry’s healthy skepticism combined well with his back- ground as a philologist and his search for principles and methods to produce insightful work on the history of lin- guistics. A citation from his paper on the history of the comparative method (Hoenigswald, 1966, p. 1) will serve to illustrate: Existing self-description, being itself a phenomenon in the history of schol- arship, must not necessarily be taken at face value. On the other hand, the business of gleaning procedures, principles, and presuppositions from an analysis of the record is a slow process which has been engaged in for some areas but not for others. Yet it alone can yield the substance in which we are interested. Among the “few strands” he had to offer in what he called “this rich tissue,” one brings neatly to the fore Henry’s attitude and insight: the interpretation of the famous state- ment made in 1786 by Sir William Jones, with which he dealt on more than one occasion (e.g., 1963, pp. 2-3; 1974, p. 349). Jones’s words, which Henry cited almost in full (Hoenigswald, 1963, p. 2), are: The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful struc- ture; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick , though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian may be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing the antiquities of Persia. Henry’s careful reading of Jones’s proclamation, taking it in the context of its time, rules out any possibility that Jones had in mind a protolanguage as reconstructed through modern methods or a procedure for recovering such a source.

190 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS Contrasting the procedure followed in comparative linguis- tics with what Jones said and alluding to the possibility of wrongly reading such a procedure into this statement, Henry remarks (1963, p. 3), “We are asked to imagine that Jones had in some intuitive fashion subjected Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit to a similar process, and had been forced to con- clude (as indeed we would now be forced to conclude) that the ancestor was unlike each of the three. But this cannot be right.” He then goes on to demonstrate how this read- ing of Jones’s statement could not be correct. Henry was keenly aware of the intellectual legacies to which he was heir. Forty years after leaving Europe, he would say in recollection (Hoenigswald, 1980, p. 24): About the substantive work I learned from such masters as Sommer, Fiesel, Leumann, and Devoto and from fellow students like Ernst Risch. From Leumann, in particular, I learned more, namely that there are formalisms in historical linguistics which have little to do with sound laws, and that you can discuss them observing and analyzing the masterpieces of the Brugmanns and the Wackernagels, and, in general, the riches of the scholarly record. Leumann’s paper on the mechanics (note the word!) of semantic change9 seems to me to be one of the greatest methodological gems, for all its hardnosed factualness. My own first publications were case histories having to do with the “mechanics” of the word-formation. It is evident that in Manu Leumann, who also was a Homeric scholar and a Latinist, Henry met not only a men- tor at a time of need but also a kindred spirit. For Henry’s work and reminiscences of his early school days show a brilliant intellect given to detailed investigations of prob- lems whose solutions are amenable to formalism. It is just as evident that Henry later met with an equally sympathetic and brilliant spirit, Zellig S. Harris, with whom he had a long and close relation, personal as well as intellectual. The emphasis on distribution that permeates Henry’s work is to be seen also in the theoretical linguistic work Harris car-

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 191 ried out in the last century from the 1940s to the early 1990s.10 Henry and Harris met regularly during the sixties, seventies, and eighties to discuss problems of common in- terest. It must not be forgotten that Harris began his career as a Semitist, so that Henry’s investigations into historical and comparative linguistics could meet with a sympathetic and comprehending mind in these discussions. Henry’s association with Zellig Harris was but one in an extensive network of friends and colleagues. At the time he came to Penn, the linguistics department was in its in- fancy, with Harris and Leigh Lisker, a phonetician, as col- · leagues, later to be joined by the logician Henry Hiz. When I joined the department in 1965—after five years in the Department of South Asian Regional Studies—it was a very small close-knit group of scholars who not only regularly met to exchange ideas but frequently also attended one another’s seminars. Henry was central to this group. He also showed extraordinary warmth and lack of pretense. I have personal memories of joint seminars we gave in which we both could freely exchange opposing views in search of better solutions to problems of common interest, though I was more than 20 years his junior. During those years, al- though our linguistics department was itself quite small, the University of Pennsylvania could boast of an outstand- ingly broad and distinguished array of programs in various allied areas, including the classics, Indic, Iranian, Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, Semitics, and Sumerology. Moreover, through the organization of teaching units known as gradu- ate groups, members of the linguistics department regu- larly taught in other departments, so that there was an ex- hilarating interaction of colleagues and students, who could take courses across departmental borders. In this atmosphere, Henry thrived and, with a superb talent for social as well as intellectual intercourse, he maintained and promoted the

192 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS study of linguistics, strengthening the department with his service as chairman over many years. These activities ex- tended well beyond the confines of Penn, and over genera- tions Henry was a prime defender and promoter of the fields he cultivated, in universities both here and abroad as well as in learned societies. Henry was also extremely generous toward young scholars worthy of support, a generosity that was rewarded with feel- ings of intellectual admiration and personal warmth toward him on the part of an array of many scholars who went on to excel. In this spirit it is fitting, I think, that I end this essay citing the whole of a Sanskrit couplet whose last part was used to end the foreword to Henry’s Festschrift: · vidvadvattvañ ca nrpatvañ ca naiva tulyam kada cana | ¯ · 11 ´ svades e pujyate raja vidvan sarvatra pujyate || ¯ ¯¯ ¯ ¯ I AM GRATEFUL TOHenry’s sister Trudy Glucksberg, his daughters Ann and Frances Hoenigswald, as well as Roswitha Grassl and Prof. Anna Morpurgo Davies for details of Henry’s early life. A fairly complete bibliography of Henry’s work through 1985 ap- peared in his Festschrift (pp. xiii-xix); a more up-to-date bibliogra- phy covering publications up to 1999 compiled by C. Justus with Henry’s cooperation is available at http://www.utexas.edu.cola/depts/ lrc/iedocctr/ie-pubs/hmh.

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 193 CHRONOLOGY 1918 Born April 17 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocl aw,/ Poland) 1932-1933 Studied in the Department of Humanities, University of Munich 1933-1934 Studied at the University of Zurich, Switzerland 1934-1935 Studied at the University of Padua, Italy 1935-1936 Studied at the University of Florence, Italy 1939 Emigrated to the United States 1944 Married to Gabrielle L. Schöpflich 1945 Naturalized citizen of the United States 1954-1958 Editor, Journal of the American Oriental Society 1968-2003 Advisory board, Language and Style 1968-1992 Member, editorial board, International Encyclopedia of Linguistics 1968-1974 Member, corporate visiting committee for the Depart ment of Foreign Literatures and Languages, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1977-2003 Associate editor, Indian Journal of Linguistics 1978-2003 Consulting editor, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of Indo-European Studies 1978-1984 Chairman, overseers committee to visit the Depart ment of Linguistics, Harvard University 1984-2003 Advisory board, Diachronica 1985 Retirement dinner, University of Pennsylvania, at which he was presented with a prepublication copy of Festschrift for Henry M. Hoenigswald 1985-2003 Consultant, Biographical Dictionary of Western Linguistics 1986 Member, comparative linguistics delegation, IREX 1987 Member, organizing committee, Colloque Meillet 2003 Died, Haverford, Pennsylvania

194 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS AWARDS AND HONORS 1942-1943 Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies 1950 Guggenheim fellow 1956 Newberry Library fellow 1958 President, Linguistic Society of America 1962-1963 Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, California (with fellowship from the National Science Foundation) 1966-1967 President, American Oriental Society 1971 Elected to the American Philosophical Society 1974 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1981 Awarded L.H.D. honoris causa, Swarthmore College 1986 Elected corresponding fellow, British Academy 1988 Elected to the National Academy of Sciences; awarded L.H.D. honoris causa, University of Pennsylvania 1991 Awarded the Henry Allen Moe Prize by the American Philosophical Society PROFESSIONAL RECORD 1936 D.Litt., University of Florence 1937 Perfezionamento, University of Florence 1936-1938 Staff member, Istituto di Studi Estruschi, Florence 1939-1942 Lecturer, research assistant, Yale University 1942-1943 Lecturer, Hartford Seminary Foundation; Hunter College 1943-1944 Lecturer in charge, Army specialized training, University of Pennsylvania 1944-1945 Lecturer, Yale University 1945-1946 Instructor, Hartford Seminary Foundation 1946 Lecturer, Hunter College; visiting associate professor, University of Michigan (Summer Institute of Linguistics) 1946-1947 P-4, Foreign Service Institute, Department of State 1947-1948 Associate professor, University of Texas at Austin 1948-1959 Associate professor, University of Pennsylvania 1952 Visiting associate professor, University of Michigan (Summer Institute of Linguistics)

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 195 1955 Senior linguist, Deccan College Postgraduate Research Institute, Poona; visiting associate professor, Georgetown University (Collitz Professor, Summer Institute of Linguistics) 1959-1985 Professor, University of Pennsylvania 1959 Visiting associate professor, University of Michigan (Summer Institute of Linguistics) 1959-1960 Visiting associate professor, Princeton University 1961-1962 Visiting professor, Yale University 1963-1970 Chairman, Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania 1968 Fulbright lecturer, University of Kiel, Germany; visiting professor, University of Michigan (Summer Institute of Linguistics) 1976-1977 Fellow, St. John’s College, Oxford, and Fulbright lecturer, Oxford University 1978-1979 Cochairman, Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania 1985-2003 Professor emeritus, University of Pennsylvania 1986 Visiting staff member, Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium 1991 James Poultney Lecturer, Johns Hopkins University

196 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS MEMBERSHIPS American Academy of Arts and Sciences American Association for the Advancement of Science American Oriental Society American Philological Association American Philosophical Society Archaeological Institute of America Friends and Alumni of Indo-European Studies, UCLA Henry Sweet Society Indogermanische Gesellschaft International Society for Historical Linguistics International Society of Friends of Wrocl aw University / Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Society of India Linguistics Association of Great Britain National Academy of Sciences New York Academy of Sciences North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences Società di Linguistica Italiana Societas Linguistica Europaea Studienkreis Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft NOTES 1. Henry is referring to E. Kieckers, Historische griechische Grammatik, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1925-1926. 2. In a typically self-deprecating manner, he went on immedi- ately to add, “Not exactly original thoughts.” 3. For example, “Here we are once more up against the gap between substantive practice and theoretical preachment” (Hoenigswald, 1978, p. 28) and earlier in the same paper (p. 21), “There were those who had no stomach for general talk and who preferred prac- ticing to preaching.” 4. For example, “In any event Rask is no closer than Jones to the idea of an algorithm for reconstruction” (Hoenigswald, 1974, p. 351). 5. In fact, Henry considered the regularity principle a defini-

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 197 tional matter and said, for example (Hoenigswald, 1978, p. 25), “But, one may ask, just what is a ‘sound change’ apart from its regularity?” 6. There are, of course, places where he could not avoid doing otherwise. For example, in dealing with differentiation (contrast developing from allomorphs) as well as what he termed “phonemic affinity in replacement partners from dialect borrowing,” he found it necessary (Hoenigswald, 1960, pp. 39-40, 51-52) to use as an ex- ample the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European *leukw and its reflexes in Indo-Iranian and Sanskrit. 7. As opposed to zero, which is (1960, p. 35, n. 8) an allomorph. In slightly different terms, “zero” denotes the absence of a morph in a context where a morph is expected (e.g., “fish” used as a plural is formally comparable to “dishes,” with an overt plural marker, so that it can be said to have a zero allomorph of a plural morpheme or to have zero as a replacement for a plural marker. On nil, see also Hoenigswald (1959). 8. Henry’s mode of presentation was always very concise, with- out verbosity or excessive use of examples, depending instead on formalism. This is evident in both Language Change and Linguistic Reconstruction—the text of which covers only 168 pages, including the bibliography and index—and, even to a larger extent, in his later collection of three articles (1973). 9. Leumann (1927). 10. For a perceptive appreciation of the contrast between Harris’s distributionalist view and what Goldsmith refers to as the mediationalist view that has dominated theoretical work in American linguistics since the late 1950s see (Goldsmith [2005, pp. 719-724]). 11. Freely translated: Being a king can never be compared to being a learned man; a king is honored in his own country, a learned man is honored everywhere.

198 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS REFERENCES Cardona, G., and N. H. Zide, eds. 1987. Festschrift for Henry M. Hoenigswald presented on the occasion of his seventieth birth- day. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Davis, B. H., and R. O’Cain, eds. 1980. First Person Singular: Papers from the Conference on an Oral Archive for the History of American Linguistics. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Lin- guistic Science. III: Studies in the History of Linguistics, vol. 21. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goldsmith, J. 2005. Review article of Bruce Nevin, ed. The legacy of Zellig Harris: Language and Information into the 21st century, vol. 1, Philosophy of science, syntax and semantics. Language 81:719-736. Hoenigswald, H. M. 1944. Internal reconstruction. Stud. Linguist. 2:78-87. Hoenigswald, H. M. 1946. Sound change and linguistic structure. Language 22:238-243. Hoenigswald, H. M. 1950. The principal step in comparative gram- mar. Language 26:357-364. Hoenigswald, H. M. 1959. Some uses of nothing. Language 35:409- 421. Hoenigswald, H. M. 1960. Language Change and Linguistic Recon- struction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoenigswald, H. M. 1963. On the history of the comparative method. Anthropol. Linguist. 5:1-11. Hoenigswald, H. M. 1966. Are there universals of linguistic change? In Universals of Language, Report of a conference held Apil 13- 15, 1961, 2nd ed., ed. J. H. Greenberg, pp. 30-52. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. Hoenigswald, H. M. 1973. [Three essays] On the notion of an inter- mediate stage in traditional historical linguistics, the three-wit- ness problem, and notes on glottochronological trees. In Studies in Formal Historical Linguistics, vol. 3, Formal Linguistics Series, Dordrecht: Reidel. Hoenigswald, H. M. 1974. Fallacies in the history of linguistics: Notes on the appraisal of the nineteenth century. In Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms, ed. D. Hymes, pp. 346-358. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 199 Hoenigswald, H. M. 1978. The annus mirabilis 1878 (Commemora- tive volume: The Neogrammarians). Trans. Philol. Soc. pp. 17- 35. Hoenigswald, H. M. 1980. A reconstruction. In First Person Singu- lar: Papers from the Conference on an Oral Archive for the His- tory of American Linguistics. Davis and O’Cain (1980, pp. 21- 28). Hoenigswald, H. M., and L. F. Wiener, eds. 1987. Biological Meta- phor and Cladistic Classification: An interdisciplinary Perspec- tive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Leumann, M. 1927. Zum Mechanismus des Bedeutungswandels. Indoger. Forsch. 45:105-118.

200 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 1937 Su alcuni caratteri della derivazione e della composizione nominale indoeuropea. Rendiconti Istituto Lombardo Lettere n.s. 1:267- 274. 1938 Problemi di linguistica umbra—a proposito delle Tabulae Iguvinae editae a Iacobo Devoto. Rivista di Filologia Classica 16:274-294. 1939 Studi sulla punteggiatura nei testi etruschi. Studi Etruschi 12:169- 217. 1940 Παν-compounds in early Greek. Language 16:183-187. 1945 Spoken Hindustani, Basic Course. 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt. 1946 Etruscan. In Encyclopedia of Literature, vol. I, ed. J. T. Shipley, pp. 278-279. New York: Philosophical Library. 1952 The phonology of dialect borrowing. Stud. Linguist. 10:1-5. 1953 I fondamenti della storia linguistica e le posizioni neogrammatiche. Lingua Nostra 12:47-50. 1954 Linguistics in the sixteenth century. Libr. Chron. 20:1-4. 1955 Change, analogic and semantic. Indian Linguist. 16:233-236.

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 201 1958 A Latin trace of the construction data radhamsi. Indian Linguist. 19-20:232-234. 1962 Bilingualism, presumed bilingualism, and diachrony. Anthropol. Linguist. 4:1-5. Lexicography and grammar. In Problems in Lexicography, ed. F. W. Housholder, pp. 103-110. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1964 Mycenaean augments and the language of poetry. In Mycenaean Studies: Proceedings of the 3rd International Colloquium for Mycenaean Studies, ed. E. L. Bennett Jr., pp. 179-182. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Graduality, sporadicity, and the minor sound change processes. Phonetica 11:202-215. 1965 Indo-Iranian evidence. In Evidence for Laryngeals, ed. W. Winter, pp. 93-99. The Hague: Mouton. 1966 Criteria for the subgrouping of languages. In Ancient Indo-Euro- pean Dialects, ed. H. Birnbaum and J. Puhvel, pp. 1-12. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1968 A note on overlength in Greek. Word 24:252-254. The syllabaries and Etruscan writing. Incunabula Graeca 25:410- 416. 1970 With G. Cardona and A. Senn, eds. Indo-European and Indo Euro- peans. Haney Foundation Series 9. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

202 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS 1973 Relative chronology—notes on so-called intermediate stages. In Pro- ceedings of the XIth International Congress of Linguists, vol. I, ed. L. Heilmann, pp. 369-373. Bologna: Il Mulino. 1974 Internal reconstruction and context. In Historical Linguistics: Pro- ceedings of the First International Conference on Historical Lin- guistics, vol. II, eds. J. M. Anderson and C. Jones, pp. 189-201. Amsterdam: North Holland. 1977 Diminutives and tatpurusas: The Indo-European trend toward endocentricity. J. Indo-Eur. Stud. 5:9-13. Intentions, assumptions, and contradictions in historical linguistics. In Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, ed. R. W. Cole, pp. 168- 193. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1978 Adjectives as first compound members in Homer. In Linguistic and Literary Studies in Honor of A. A. Hill, vol. III, Historical and Comparative Linguistics, eds. M. A. Jayazeri, E. C. Polomé, and W. Winter, pp. 91-95. The Hague: Mouton. Secondary split, typology, and universals. In Recent Developments in Historical Phonology, ed. J. Fisiak, pp. 173-182. The Hague: Mouton. 1979 Ed. The European Background of American Linguistics. Lisse: Foris. 1980 Notes on reconstruction, word order, and stress. In Linguistic Re- construction and Indo-European Syntax, ed. P. Ramat, pp. 69-87. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1981 Degrees of genetic relatedness among languages. In Suniti Kuman Chatterji Commemoration Volume, ed. S. Mallik, pp. 113-115. Burdwan: University of Burdwan.

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 203 1984 Etymology against grammar in the early 19th century. Histoire, épistémologie, language 6(2):95-100. 1985 Distinzioni reali e distinzioni chimeriche nella classificazione dei cambiamenti fonologici. In Società Linguistica Italiana: XVI 0 Congresso Internazionale di Studi, ed. L. Agostiniani et al., pp. 111-118. Roma: Bulzoni. Sir William Jones and historiography. In For Gordon H. Fairbanks, ed. V. Z. Abson and R. L. Leed, pp. 64-66. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1986 Nineteenth-century linguistics on itself. In Studies in the History of Western Linguistics in Honour of R. H. Robins, eds. T. Bynon and F. R. Palmer, pp. 172-188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Some properties of analogic innovations. In Linguistics Across His- torical and Geographic Boundaries, vol. 1, eds. D. Kastovsky and A. Szwedek, pp. 357-370. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 1987 Bloomfield and historical linguistics. Hist. Ling. 14:73-88. Language family trees, topological and metrical. In Biological Meta- phor and Cladistic Classification: An interdisciplinary perspec- tive, eds. H. M. Hoenigswald and L. F. Wiener, pp. 257-267. Phila- delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1989 Language obsolescence and language history: Matters of linearity, leveling, loss, and the like. In Investigating Obsolescence: Stud- ies in Language Contraction and Death, ed. N. C. Dorian, pp. 347-354. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Overlong syllables in Rgvedic cadences. J. Am. Orient. Soc. 109:559- 563.

204 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS 1990 Does language grow on trees? Ancestry, descent, regularity. Proc. Am. Philos. Soc. 134(1):10-18. 1992 Comparative method, internal reconstruction, typology. In Recon- structing Language and Culture, eds. E. C. Polomé and W. Win- ter, pp. 23-34. Trends in Linguistics 58. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 1993 Greco. In Le Lingue Indoeuropee , eds. A. G. Ramat and P. Ramat, pp. 255-288. Bologna: Il Mulino. 1998 Greek. In The Indo-European Languages, eds. A. G. Ramat and P. Ramat, pp. 228-260. London: Routledge. (English version of [1993]). 2000 Historical-comparative grammar. In Morphology: An International Handbook on Inflection and Word Formation, vol. 1, eds. G. Booij, C. Lehmann, and J. Mugdan in collaboration with W. Kesselheim and S. Skopetas, pp. 117-124. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 2004 Indo-European. In Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages, ed. R. G. Woodard, pp. 534-550. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press. (This article was composed by Henry and seen through press by R. Woodard and J. P. T. Clackson.)

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 205

Next: WILLIAM WHITE HOWELLS »
Biographical Memoirs: Volume 89 Get This Book
×
Buy Hardback | $112.00
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF

On March 3, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Act of Incorporation that brought the National Academy of Sciences into being. In accordance with that original charter, the Academy is a private, honorary organization of scientists, elected for outstanding contributions to knowledge, who can be called upon to advise the federal government. As an institution the Academy's goal is to work toward increasing scientific knowledge and to further the use of that knowledge for the general good.

The Biographical Memoirs, begun in 1877, are a series of volumes containing the life histories and selected bibliographies of deceased members of the Academy. Colleagues familiar with the discipline and the subject's work prepare the essays. These volumes, then, contain a record of the life and work of our most distinguished leaders in the sciences, as witnessed and interpreted by their colleagues and peers. They form a biographical history of science in America—an important part of our nation's contribution to the intellectual heritage of the world.

  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!