Michael David Fortescue (born 8 August 1946, Thornbury[1]) is a British-born[2]linguist specializing in Arctic and native North American languages, including Greenlandic, Inuktun, Chukchi and Nitinaht.
As a young teenager, Fortescue and his family moved to California where he went to La Jolla High School, graduating in 1959.[1][3] He finished school at Abingdon School in 1963.[4] In 1966, he received a B.A. with "Honours with great Distinction" in Slavic languages and literatures from University of California, Berkeley, where he then taught Russian from 1968 to 1970 and finished an M.A. in Slavic languages and literatures. In the years from 1971 to 1975 he taught English for the International Language Centre in Osaka and the University of Aix/Marseille.[3] He took a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh from 1975 to 1978[5] with the thesis Procedural discourse generation model for 'Twenty Questions'.[6] With a Danish scholarship, he visited University of Copenhagen and did fieldwork in Greenland in from 1978 to 1979, and this research became supported from the Danish Research Council for the Humanities in the period from 1979 to 1982. In 1984, he became associate professor in eskimology at the University of Copenhagen, and in 1989 docent.[3] He became professor in linguistics in 1999, and retired in 2011.[2]
On the occasion of his retirement in 2011, a special issue in the journal Grønland was published in 2012 as a festschrift. After retiring, he moved to England,[1] where he was elected an associate of St Hugh's College.[7] An edited book was published as a festschrift in his honour in 2017.[8] In 2019, he was elected to Academia Europaea.[7]
His Comparative Eskimo Dictionary, co-authored with Steven Jacobson and Lawrence Kaplan,[9] is the standard work in its area, as is his Comparative Chukotko-Kamchatkan Dictionary.[10] In his book Pattern and Process,[11] Fortescue explores the possibilities of a linguistic theory based on the philosophical theories of Alfred North Whitehead.[12][13][bettersourceneeded]
A more complete listing is available in the Festschrift in his honor.[8]
1984. Some Problems Concerning the Correlation and Reconstruction of Eskimo and Aleut Mood Markers. Institut for Eskimologi, Københavns Universitet.
1990. From the Writings of the Greenlanders: Kalaallit Atuakklaannit. University of Alaska Press.
1991. Inuktun: An Introduction to the Language of Qaanaaq, Thule. Institut for eskimologis skriftrække, Københavns Universitet.
1992. Editor. Layered Structure and Reference in a Functional Perspective. John Benjamins Publishing Co.
1994. With Steven Jacobson and Lawrence Kaplan. Comparative Eskimo Dictionary with Aleut Cognates. Alaska Native Language Center.
1998. Language Relations across Bering Strait: Reappraising the Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence. London and New York: Cassell.
2001. Pattern and Process: A Whiteheadian Perspective on Linguistics. John Benjamins Publishing Co.
2002. The Domain of Language. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.
2005. Comparative Chukotko-Kamchatkan Dictionary. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
2007. Comparative Wakashan Dictionary. Munich: LINCOM Europa.
2016. Comparative Nivkh Dictionary. Munich: LINCOM Europa.
1 2 3 Grove, Arnaq (2012). "Introduktion til festskrift i anledning af Michael Fortescues fratrædelse fra Københavns Universitet". Grønland. 60 (2): 80–83.
1 2 3 Riegels, Naja (30 January 2009). "Michael Fortescue". Den Store Danske (in Danish). Lex.dk. Retrieved 15 November 2023.
1 2 Kaplan, Lawrence D.; Berge, Anna, eds. (2017). "Publications on Indigenous Languages by Michael D. Fortescue". Studies in Inuit Linguistics. In Honor of Michael Fortescue. Fairbanks, Alaska: Alaska Native Language Center. pp.185–190. ISBN978-1-55500-125-4.
Bobaljik, Jonathan David (1998). "Review of Comparative Eskimo Dictionary with Aleut Cognates". Book Reviews. Anthropological Linguistics. 40 (3): 514–518. JSTOR30028655.
Dorais, Louis-Jacques (2011). "Review of Comparative Eskimo Dictionary With Aleut Cognates, Second Edition". Book Reviews. Études/Inuit/Studies. 35 (1–2): 294. doi:10.7202/1012850ar.
Vajda, Edward J. (2003). "Review of Pattern and Process: A Whiteheadian Perspective on Linguistics". Book Notices. Language. 79 (3): 653. doi:10.1353/lan.2003.0194.
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