Excerpts from the heartfelt tribute to Jim, shared by his daughter, Lynn Corinne Harris.

On November 10, 2024, James "Jim" Wesley Harris passed away peacefully at the age of 92. Jim was a longtime resident of Lexington, MA, and before that Boston, Cambridge, and Mexico City. Retired from the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he remains internationally recognized as a highly influential figure in the area of Romance linguistics, and “el decano” (“dean”) of Spanish phonology. He was also known for his expert musicianship, sweet demeanor and sharp wit, and devotion to his late wife of more than 50 years, Florence Warshawsky Harris (1937-2020). He leaves his daughter, Lynn Corinne Harris, his son-in-law, Rabbi David Adelson, and his grandchildren, Bee Adelson and Sam Harris, all of Brooklyn.
Jim was born in 1932 in East Point, Georgia, to a Baptist family. His father, Charles Wesley Harris, worked for the railroad and had a quiet sense of humor. His mother, Lucy Margaret Crawford Harris, was a Sunday school teacher and skilled seamstress, with deep family roots in Cassville. Jim's maternal aunts, Bessie and Corinne, were also influential in his upbringing. His mother's family, the Redwines, originally from Prussia, traces its U.S. ancestry back to the early 1700s, with six direct connections to the Revolutionary War.

After graduating from high school in Georgia, Jim attended the University of Georgia, the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Mexico became his second home, Spanish his second first language.
During the Korean War, he performed his military service as the clarinet and saxophone instructor at the U.S. Naval School of Music in Washington, D.C. After discharge, he directed the band at the Charlotte Hall School in Maryland, where he also taught Spanish, French, and Latin.
He received an MA in linguistics from the Louisiana State University and a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT. Having achieved national recognition as an English-Spanish bilingual teacher and teacher-trainer he was engaged as a writer at the Modern Language Materials Development Center in New York. Later, he co-authored, with Guillermo Segreda, a series of popular college-level Spanish textbooks.

He was an MIT faculty member for decades, serving as head of the department then called Foreign Languages and Literatures, eventually retiring as Professor Emeritus of Spanish and Linguistics.

In his early days at MIT, when French, German, and Russian dominated as elite “languages of science and world literature,” he championed, over some opposition, the introduction of Spanish language and literature courses. He later oversaw inclusion of Japanese and Chinese courses as well. He promoted undergraduate courses in linguistics, leading to a full undergraduate degree program in linguistics—thus broadening the focus of the prestigious Ph.D. program.

His research in linguistics centered on theoretical phonology and morphology. His books, presentations at professional meetings, and articles in peer-reviewed journals were among the most discussed—in both positive and negative assessments, as he says—by prominent scholars in the field. The ability to teach complex technical material comfortably in Spanish plus the status of an MIT professorship resulted in invitations to teach at universities across Spain and Latin America. He was also highly valued as a member of the editorial boards of several professional journals. From the 2016 festschrift The Syllable and Stress: Studies in Honor of James W. Harris, the editor Rafael Núñez Cedeño says: “Jim Harris has guided the work of a generation and more of linguistic scholarship.”

Jim leaves a profound and lasting legacy, both to linguistics and to all the people who loved him.

Linguistic Field(s): Morphology
Phonology

Subject Language(s): Spanish (spa)

Language Family(ies): Romance