LINGUIST List 14.2891

Thu Oct 23 2003

All: Obituary: Joseph R. Applegate

Editor for this issue: Sarah Murray <sarahlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Paul Fallon, The Death of Joseph R. Applegate

Howard University Professor Emeritus Joseph R. Applegate, a Berber
specialist, died October 18 of pneumonia at age 78.

An obituary appeared in the Washington Post on October 22 and is
available at this link for two weeks:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62026-2003Oct21.html

The biographical information below is extracted from the obituary:

Prof. Applegate received his doctorate in linguistics in 1955 from the
University of Pennsylvania, then became one of the first African
American faculty members at MIT, where he taught Romance languages and
worked on machine translation. He later taught Berber languages at
UCLA before moving to Howard University in 1966. At Howard, he taught
Romance languages and then moved to the African Studies department
until his retirement in 2002.

Among his best-known publications is the chapter on Berber languages
from Afroasiatic: A Survey in Mouton's Current Trends in Linguistics
Series. In addition, he drafted a course and descriptive grammar on
Spoken Kabyle, as well as ''An Outline of the Structure of Shilha''
and ''The Structure of Riff.''

- Paul D. Fallon
Howard University