Terrence Kaufman
Terrence Kaufman was an American linguist who specialized in lexicography, Mesoamerican historical linguistics, the documentation of unwritten languages, and language contact phenomena. He served as Professor Emeritus of linguistics and anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh.
Early life and education
Kaufman was born on June 12, 1937.He received his PhD in Linguistics in 1963 from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on the grammar of the Tzeltal language.
Career
He taught at Ohio State University, then at University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of Pittsburgh until his retirement in 2011.Kaufman produced descriptive and comparative historical studies of languages of the Mayan, Siouan, Hokan, Uto-Aztecan, Mixe–Zoquean, and Oto-Manguean families. His work on empirical documentation of unwritten languages through fieldwork and training of native linguists gave rise to a rich body of published work as well as a substantial unpublished corpus of notes. Many of his articles were co-authored with scholars such as Lyle Campbell, Sarah Thomason, and John Justeson.
In a 1976 paper co-authored with Lyle Campbell, Kaufman advanced a theory that the Olmecs spoke a Mixe–Zoquean language, based on the significant presence of early Mixe–Zoquean loans in many Mesoamerican languages, particularly from specific, culturally significant semantic domains. Along with Lyle Campbell and Thomas Smith-Stark, Kaufman carried out research published in Language which led to the recognition of Mesoamerica as a linguistic area.
In Language contact, Creolization, and genetic linguistics, Kaufman and Thomason developed a theoretical framework for the understanding of the processes of contact-induced language change.
In 1993, along with John Justeson, Kaufman claimed to have successfully deciphered the Isthmian or Epi-Olmec script. This claim was rejected by anthropologists Michael Coe and Stephen Houston in 2004 after using the decipher key on a recently discovered jade mask. Coe states that the result "turns out to be total nonsense and gobbledygook". In the years prior to his death, Kaufman was involved in the "Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica" or PDLMA, which focused on collecting standardized linguistic data from the under-documented languages of Mesoamerica.
Early advocate and activist for the role of native speakers
In the early 1970s, Kaufman visited Guatemala to conduct linguistic surveys in the Mayan highlands. These surveys eventually led to his proposal for a classification of the Mayan languages. In the process, he stopped at the Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín in Antigua Guatemala, a Guatemalan NGO intent on becoming a national Mayan-based resource institution.In collaboration with PLFM staff and inspired in part by Kenneth Hale's unpublished paper from the 1960s, American Indians in Linguistics, Kaufman was a key participant in the development of the PLFM's plan to train one hundred community-based native speakers of Mayan languages, mostly primary school graduates, to become descriptive linguists for their own languages. He spent the summer leading them through a level of training usually reserved for university students. In this, he was supported by a dozen professional linguists who were pursuing their PhDs, such as Nora England and Judith Maxwell. Each served for several years under the auspices of the Peace Corps to provide year-round follow-up training.
Under Kaufman's leadership, and in consultation with this corps of linguists and Mayan trainees, PLFM developed a proposal for "rational" alphabets for each of the Mayan languages, which respected the integrity and unique features of each. The Proposal for alphabets and orthographies for writing the Mayan languages was published in Spanish in January 1976 under Kaufman's name by the Guatemalan Ministry of Education, which supported the proposal. However, due to the polarized environment of 1970s Guatemala, the proposal faced opposition from some proponents of orthographies that imposed Spanish language orthography on the Mayan languages. A corps of PLFM Mayan linguists joined national congresses and debates. In the 1980s, the Guatemalan National Congress enacted legislation that made the alphabet that Kaufman and the PLFM had proposed the legal, national alphabet of the country. The Mayan trainees, who had assumed leadership of the PLFM in 1976, had been so involved in the consideration of Kaufman's published proposal that some later suggested that they should have been co-authors.
Additionally, together with Jo Froman, a PLFM linguistic aide whom he had trained, Kaufman completed his nationwide linguistic surveys and a dialect boundary mapping exercise. He then published a proposed classification for the Mayan languages. Translated and edited by Lic. Flavio Rojas Lima of the Seminario de Integración Social, PLFM volunteer Margarita Cruz, PLFM Director Tony Jackson, and supported by Ministry of Education language advisor Salvador Aguado Andreut, published the proposal in Spanish in 1974 as Idiomas de Mesoamerica.
Selected bibliography
Articles
Books