S. Robert Ramsey


Samuel Robert Ramsey Jr. is an American linguist. He specializes in the linguistics of East Asian languages, especially Korean and Japanese. He is professor emeritus of East Asian linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he also served as chair of the Department of Asian and East European Languages and Cultures. He is considered to be a significant Western academic on Korean linguistics. Ramsey is the author of The Languages of China and co-author of A History of the Korean Language.

Biography

Ramsey first encountered the Korean language when he was dispatched to South Korea in 1966 as part of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps. Ramsey received a Bachelor of Civil Engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1966. After graduating from Georgia Tech, Ramsey served as an officer in the United States Army Ordnance Corps from 1966 to 1968.
After military service, Ramsey studied Korean at the Korean Language Institute of Yonsei University, followed by a year of Mandarin Chinese at Taiwan Normal University. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Yale University in 1975. His thesis is entitled Accent and Morphology in Korean Dialects and his advisor was Samuel E. Martin. From 1975 to 1984, he taught at Columbia University. He has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania. He received three Fulbright Scholarships throughout his career, including fellowships at Seoul National University and Kyoto University.
Ramsey conducted original research on a Hamgyŏng dialect, and, by comparing it to Gyeongsang dialects and Middle Korean, reconstructed earlier stages of the language. His subsequent work has focused on the historical development of Japanese and Korean and the historical relationships between the two languages. He is known for his research on Korean dialects and the reconstruction of prehistoric stages of Korean, and has also written on sociolinguistic topics. In 1998, he received a from South Korean president Kim Dae-jung for service to the study of the Korean language.
In 2011, Ramsey and Ki-Moon Lee published A History of the Korean Language.

Awards and honors

  • 1998: from President Kim Dae-jung for service to the study of the Korean language
  • 2010: Tongsung Academic Prize from the Tongsung Academic Foundation, Seoul
  • 2013: Precious Crown Medal for Cultural Merit, the highest level of cultural recognition awarded by the South Korean government, presented by Prime Minister Jung Hong-won on behalf of President Park Geun-hye
  • 2015: Ilsuk Award for Academic Achievement from the Ilsuk Foundation, for outstanding achievements in Korean linguistics

Selected works

Accent and Morphology in Korean Dialects