LINGUIST List 17.1390
Fri May 05 2006
All: Obituary: David D. Thomas (1930-2006)
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Obituary: David D. Thomas (1930-2006)
Message 1: Obituary: David D. Thomas (1930-2006)
Date: 02-May-2006
From: Brian Migliazza <brian_migliazzasil.org>
Subject: Obituary: David D. Thomas (1930-2006)
David D. Thomas (1930-2006)- Southeast Asia Linguist OBITUARY: www.sil.org/linguistics/personnel/ThomasObit.html REMEMBRANCES: www.sil.org/linguistics/personnel/ThomasRemembrances.html
SIL International mourns the loss of one of its eminent linguists, David Thomas, who passed away on April 14, 2006 at the age of 76 in North Carolina. David will be remembered for his outstanding contributions to linguistics and Mon-Khmer languages, for his energetic teaching, for his field work in mainland Southeast Asia, and for his service as mentor to a great number of students and to his junior colleagues.
David Thomas, was a leading pioneer in Mon-Khmer (AustroAsiatic) linguistics. It may be difficult to appreciate now in the 21st century just how little was known about this Southeast Asian family of languages when he arrived in Vietnam in the 1950's to begin research. Respected scholars were still, following Pater Wilhelm Schmidt, classifying Chamic languages as Mon-Khmer? an issue laid to rest by Richard Pittman in 1959. The sub-groupings of Mon-Khmer languages were vague and had little empirical basis. Thomas, acknowledging the great French scholarly tradition in Indochina and celebrating especially the ground-breaking work of Haudricourt, set about with his colleagues both to study in detail and to classify the many Montagnard groups in the region. He, along with Prof. Nguyen Dinh Hoa, formed the Linguistic Circle of Saigon, which in turn launched the journal Mon-Khmer Studies in 1964.
Thomas was a student of the classic comparative linguistic method, having studied with some of the best in the field at the University of Pennsylvania. Historically, he sought to understand the possible Chamic migration effects that appeared to have 'split' South Bahnaric groups from North Bahnaric ones. He was keenly interested in explanations for the variegated manifestations of Mon-Khmer phonological register systems. He accurately judged that while reconstructing proto consonants in Mon-Khmer would turn out to be relatively straightforward, the convoluted evolution of register-related vocalic systems in the daughter languages would pose a huge challenge.
Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics Discipline of Linguistics General Linguistics Genetic Classification Historical Linguistics Language Description Phonology
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