LINGUIST List 21.3534 Sun Sep 05 2010 All: Obituary: Horace Lunt (1918-2010) Editor for this issue: Elyssa Winzeler <elyssalinguistlist.org> To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.cfm Directory         1.    Michael Flier, Obituary: Horace Lunt (1918-2010) Message 1: Obituary: Horace Lunt (1918-2010) Date: 03-Sep-2010 From: Michael Flier <flierfas.harvard.edu> Subject: Obituary: Horace Lunt (1918-2010) E-mail this message to a friend Horace Gray Lunt (1918–2010) At the end of his first year at Harvard in 1937–38, Horace Lunt decided to concentrate in Russian studies on the basis of his recent study of the language, so different from the Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, and German he had already pursued before coming to Cambridge. His adviser, Samuel Hazzard Cross, encouraged him to stay with German instead, because in Russian 'there is no chance for a job.' Lunt received his degree magna cum laude in German in 1941 with a senior honors thesis on Herman Hesse, but he had been bitten by the Russian bug and ultimately ignored Cross’ well-meaning advice, going on to become one of the world’s leading experts in Slavic philology and linguistics. Horace Gray Lunt, Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, at Harvard University, passed away on August 11, 2010, in Baltimore, Maryland, scarcely a month short of his ninety-second birthday. At Harvard he was a member of the Slavic Department faculty from 1949 to 1989 and served as its chair from 1959 to 1974. Lunt served on the Executive Committee of the Russian Research Center (now the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies) from 1965 to 1992, and on the Executive Committee of the Ukrainian Research Institute from its founding in 1973 to 1991. He was Director of the Slavic and East European Language and Area Center from 1983 to 1989. Armed with considerable linguistic and analytic skills, Lunt was instrumental in reshaping Slavic philology in the United States in structuralist terms. He insisted on the highest standards of textual analysis, providing new pedagogical tools for the post-World War II generation of American Slavists, investigating understudied areas of Slavic linguistics, and indicating new projects for in-depth study in Slavic languages, literatures, and cultures. A staunch foe of nationalistic exploitation of language for political purposes, Lunt strove his entire career to ensure that linguistic argumentation rested on a rational, factual basis, countering any discussion based on nationalism or demagoguery. Lunt was a superlative teacher, providing his students, undergraduate as well as graduate, with abundant handouts, charts, texts, and textbooks to ensure comprehensive understanding of the subject matter at hand, with clarity and accuracy his guiding principles. His interests in Slavic languages were wide-ranging, from paleography, phonology, morphology, and syntax to etymology, sociolinguistics, history, literature, and religion, and he leaves behind large bibliography of published books, articles, and reviews. Lunt was born Horace Gray Lunt II in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on September 12, 1918, son of Horace Fletcher Lunt (Harvard 1898) and Irene Jewett Lunt, and the grandson of Horace Gray Lunt (Harvard 1870), his namesake. He was the youngest of four children and the only son. He traced his ancestry back to the Englishman Henry Lunt, who founded Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1634. His great-grandfather Orrington Lunt, together with John Evans, founded Northwestern University in the newly settled Chicago suburb of Evanston in 1851. Following early public schooling in Denver, Lunt attended the Kent School in Connecticut from 1932 to 1937, graduating at the head of his class, having demonstrated a particular talent for languages. After his graduation from Harvard in 1941, Lunt made his way to Berkeley to complete a one-year master’s degree program in Russian with George Rapall Noyes and Alexander Kaun. Drafted into the army in September, 1942, Lunt demonstrated typing skills that resulted in his swift promotion to corporal as the head of his Louisiana medical unit (despite his lack of medical training). His aptitude for linguistics soon earned him a transfer to the Counter Intelligence Corps and a new assignment in Egypt followed by a stint in Italy, interviewing Yugoslav refugees, embellishing his knowledge of Serbian and Croatian, and learning Slovene as well. He returned to Berkeley in November, 1945, to accept a teaching assistantship in Russian for the academic year. In the summer of 1946 he decided to develop his knowledge of modern linguistics by enrolling in the Linguistic Society of America Summer Linguistic Institute, held at the University of Michigan. It was here that he took classes from some of the leading American descriptivists of the day and that he made the acquaintance of the eminent émigré Russian structuralist Roman Jakobson, who had finally found a permanent position that year at Columbia University. Jakobson, who would prove to be a pivotal figure in Lunt’s career, reviewed Lunt’s plan to accept a fellowship from the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education to study Slavic linguistics with some of the outstanding Czech linguists of the day at Charles University in Prague, including Antonín Frinta, whose lectures on the newly official Macedonian language would spark a particular interest in the budding young Slavist. After a twelve-month stay, Lunt was obliged to abandon Prague because of the worsening post-war political climate in Eastern Europe. He entered the Ph.D. program at Columbia in the fall of 1947 to study under Jakobson’s supervision, and taught Serbo-Croatian in 1948–49 while completing a dissertation entitled 'The Orthography of Eleventh-Century Russian Manuscripts,' in which he demonstrated his impressive philological skills in distinguishing graphemic system from scribal error. Lunt’s undergraduate mentor at Harvard, Samuel Hazzard Cross, had suffered a fatal heart attack in 1946, leaving the nation’s oldest Slavic program without a leader. Russian historian Michael Karpovich stepped into the breach, gained the support of a Harvard administration that had established the Russian Research Center in 1948, and helped found the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1949. Karpovich had entered into successful negotiations with Roman Jakobson to move to Harvard that very fall. Jakobson encouraged the new chair to hire Lunt as an assistant professor as well. A golden age of Slavic studies was about to commence and it would be the Harvard Slavic Department, with the addition of a number of distinguished, mostly émigré, scholars to its faculty, that would fundamentally alter the field by training scores of new American Slavists to take up college and university posts in Slavic linguistics and literatures across the nation over the next several decades, especially after the launching of Sputnik in 1957. The Cold War and the space race it generated created strong interest in Slavic, and especially Russian, studies, a significant turn that resulted in increased government funding for new programs and research. The return to Cambridge was a mixed blessing for Lunt. Professionally it afforded an unmatchable opportunity to participate in the renaissance of Slavic studies together with Jakobson, not to mention the chance to work with the rich collections of Slavic materials Harvard libraries and archives could offer a scholar of his caliber. But as a son of the Rocky Mountains, Lunt understood that he was committing himself to life in an ancestral New England he had experienced from his youth as narrowly parochial and confining, a corollary to which he ultimately resigned himself. For relaxation, he occupied himself with sight reading classical music on the piano, puttering around the garden, and reading detective stories. Lunt’s beginnings at Harvard were largely devoted to creating new course materials for teaching the Russian language and Old Church Slavonic (OCS), the oldest written form of Slavic, whose mastery is vital for the study of Slavic linguistics and literatures. Descriptive grammars and other reference materials in English were either nonexistent or woefully inadequate. Lunt’s early efforts resulted in the publication of his Old Church Slavonic Grammar in 1955 and his Fundamentals of Russian in 1957. In both works he demonstrated the advantage of applying structuralist techniques to the description of a language, ancient or modern, to reveal its coherent grammatical system, as shown in the operation of the rules governing the use of alphabets, the sound system, the formation and derivation of words, and the structure of the sentence. Revised in 1968, Fundamentals of Russian remained a standard of Russian language instruction for over a quarter of a century. Old Church Slavonic Grammar, now in its seventh revised edition (2001), remains one of the best OCS grammars in any language because of its comprehensive coverage, its clarity of explanation, and its rich exemplification. Lunt’s meticulous attention to detail was no more evident than in his signature course, Old Church Slavonic, typically taken by first-year graduate students with a good knowledge of Russian. Unlike many instructors of such courses who spend most of a semester teaching the intricacies of OCS grammar and then follow up with readings from a few Gospel selections at the end of the term, Lunt presented a brief overview of the grammar and then immediately plunged students into the reading and analysis of the texts themselves, arming them with his own reference materials and notes to help them cope with the difficult material. Lunt always tried to maintain the atmosphere of a team effort, asking pertinent questions where needed to move the inquiry to a successful conclusion. It was a baptism of fire that was both intimidating and salutary, eliciting similar subsequent reactions from linguistic and literature students who viewed Lunt’s OCS class as one of the most intensive, well organized, and analytically stimulating courses they had ever taken. He enjoyed equal success in teaching courses in the history of Russian (for which he ultimately published the Concise Dictionary of Old Russian (11th–17th Centuries in 1970), readings in Slavic texts, comparative Slavic linguistics (an excursus for which was published as The Progressive Palatalization of Common Slavic in 1981), and a host of specialized courses in Slavic philology and linguistics. Being of non-Slavic origin in a field still dominated by native-born Slavic scholars in the 1940s and 1950s, Lunt was able to address sociolinguistic issues squarely on a factual basis rather than resorting to argumentation based on nationalistic ideology or cultural bias. His 1950 attendance at the first Yugoslav seminar in Bled led to his meeting Blaže Koneski, the distinguished Macedonian philologist, who urged his American colleague to learn more about the Macedonian language and culture in situ. The fieldwork pursued by Lunt the following summer served as the basis of his groundbreaking work, A Grammar of the Macedonian Literary Language, which appeared in 1952, the first such grammar in English. The work sparked immediate controversy between those Slavic linguists and cultural historians who felt the push for a codified Macedonian language was historically supportable, and their opponents, who viewed Macedonian as nothing more than a western dialectal variant of Bulgarian and therefore to be discussed only within the context of Bulgarian dialectology. Lunt later recalled that it was during the summer of his fieldwork in June, 1951, that he learned of a smuggled Bulgarian newspaper that denounced Yugoslav language policies and sharply criticized all attempts to establish a standard Macedonian language. The paper went on to state that 'local talent was insufficient and the hapless Yugoslavs had been forced to import a spy to create the language for them. Takiva horaslantovtsi nam ne triabvat! [We don’t need such Horace Luntites!].' Lunt recalled 'feeling flattered at the powers attributed to me, and rather pleased at the notion of a political heresy named after me.' Greeks, on the contrary, were outraged that the name Macedonian could be assigned to a non-Greek tongue, and protested vigorously against the very notion of a Slavic Macedonian people and its language. Both disputes rage on to this very day. As so often in his career, Lunt refused to remain silent on such issues. He courageously dismantled in scholarly articles, reviews, and letters to the editor the flimsy arguments of those manipulating linguistic and historical facts to stifle the cultural, political, and linguistic authenticity of minority ethnic groups. For his role in contributing to the codification of literary Macedonian, Lunt was accorded foreign membership in the Macedonian Academy of Sciences in 1969, the first American citizen to earn that high honor. Lunt’s devotion to the truth, regardless of cultural and political consequences, was as firm as ever nearly a half century later in the 1998 publication 'The Slavonic Book of Esther: Text, Lexicon, Linguistic Analysis, Problems of Translation,' coauthored with Moshe Taube of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Despite a clearly garbled textual history that points to a Ruthenian scribal tradition for the oldest surviving manuscripts (from ca. 1400), Lunt and Taube were able to show through careful linguistic and textological analysis that the earliest Church Slavonic version of the Book of Esther was based not on an original Hebrew text presumably translated by a Jew, but rather on a noncanonical, no longer extant Greek translation from the Hebrew, traceable only through its Church Slavonic progeny. This analysis undercut a view long favored in Russia of a culturally and ethnically diverse and tolerant ancient Kievan state. Lunt’s high academic standards and dedication to accuracy and comprehensiveness made him a formidable writer of reviews, taking to task any scholar, novice or distinguished academician, who professed to be discussing a problem or set of issues coherently and accurately, when in fact the evidence showed quite the opposite. A recipient no doubt cringed upon reading evaluations like 'distressingly unsatisfactory,' 'scandalously bad,' 'incompetence and professional irresponsibility,' '[the book] has its good points, but reliability unfortunately is not one of them,' and 'We have the right to demand clear and adequate explanations; based on coherent theory,' especially since they were typically reinforced by a cascade of examples of inaccuracy, inconsistency, anachronism, and opaqueness. In September, 1973, Omeljan Pritsak, the Director of the newly founded Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard, suggested convening a weekly two-hour seminar during the academic year to discuss Lunt’s ongoing translation of the Primary Chronicle, the most important source for the early history of the East Slavs. Lunt would prepare several pages of translation distributed ahead of time, which would be evaluated on the basis of the most recent edition published in 1950 by the doyen of Soviet medievalists, Dmitrii Likhachev. The seminar featured a discussion among the major figures of Slavic medieval studies at Harvard: Ihor Ševčenko (Byzantine studies), Edward Keenan (East Slavic history), Pritsak (Turkic studies and East European history and geography), and Lunt. Interested post-doctoral scholars and graduate students witnessed the proceedings from the sidelines. A single sentence, phrase, or even word could ignite an arcane interchange of expert opinion that insured that perhaps only about a half page of Lunt’s translation would be covered. The seminar met faithfully every week for six straight years. Lunt’s translation of the Primary Chronicle, also known as the Pověst’ vrěmennyx lět (PVL) ‘The Tale of Bygone Years’ or, as Lunt preferred to reconstruct the title, Pověst’ vrěmen i lět ‘The Tale of Seasons and Years’, was completely validated in the seminar with only an occasional tweak or two recommended over the years. In the process, Likhachev’s reconstruction of the PVL was itself discredited as inaccurate and biased towards one of the major underlying texts. Lunt served as senior consultant for a new reconstruction of the PVL that appeared in 2003. Weeks before his death, Lunt gave his final approval to the text of his nearly four-decades-long translation project, now slated for publication by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Lunt was promoted from assistant professor to associate professor in 1954 and received a tenured full professorship in 1960, the same year he was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. In 1973 he succeeded Roman Jakobson as the Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He is survived by Sally Herman Lunt, his wife of forty-seven years, daughters Elizabeth Gray Lunt and Catherine Lunt Greer, son-in-law David S. Friedman, M.D., and five grandchildren. His remains will be interred in a private ceremony in Colorado Springs. A memorial commemoration of Lunt’s life and work will be held on Friday, October 22, 2010, at 3:00 p.m. in the Fong Auditorium of Boylston Hall at Harvard University. A reception will follow in the Faculty Club. In lieu of flowers, his family requests that donations in his memory be sent to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, 12 Quincy Street, Barker Center, Cambridge, MA 02138. Michael S. Flier Oleksandr Potebnja Professor of Ukrainian Philology Harvard University Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 05-Sep-2010       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.