Roger Lass | |
---|---|
Born | January 1, 1937 |
Education | Yale University (PhD, 1965) |
Spouse | Jaime Ann Krell Lass (m. 1957;died 2005) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | linguistics |
Institutions | |
Doctoral students | |
Other notable students | Philip Carr |
Roger Lass (born January 1, 1937) [2] is a historical linguist, currently Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University of Cape Town. He was previously an honorary professorial fellow at the University of Edinburgh. [3]
He earned his PhD from Yale University in 1965 in Medieval English Language and Literature, and subsequently worked at Indiana University (1964–1971), the University of Edinburgh (1972–1982), and the University of Cape Town (1983–2002). [3]
He has done extensive work in the history of English, the motivation of sound change, and the history of linguistics. He was made an honorary professor at Edinburgh in 2014. [4]
He was the editor of the third volume of The Cambridge History of the English Language .
A festschrift in honor of Lass was published in 1997 edited by Jacek Fisiak. A volume of the journal Language Sciences , entitled Collecting views on language change (Volume 24, Issues 3–4, May–July 2002, edited by Raymond Hickey) was dedicated to Lass on his sixty fifth birthday. Other essays in his honor were published in the book Motives for Language Change (CUP 2003). [5]
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
The voiceless labial–velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨xʷ⟩ or occasionally ⟨ʍ⟩. The letter ⟨ʍ⟩ was defined as a voiceless until 1979, when it was defined as a fricative with the place of articulation of the same way that is an approximant with the place of articulation of. However, the IPA Handbook treats it as both a "fricative".
The open back rounded vowel, or low back rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɒ⟩. It is called Latin turned alpha being a rotated version of Latin alpha. It seems a "turned script a", being a rotated version of "script (cursive) a", which is the variant of a that lacks the extra stroke on top of a "printed a". Latin turned alpha a ⟨ɒ⟩ has its linear stroke on the left, whereas Latin alpha a ⟨ɑ⟩ has its linear stroke on the right.
Heinz Joachim Giegerich is a Scottish linguist of German nationality, and Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Science of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Winfred Philip Lehmann was an American linguist who specialized in historical, Germanic, and Indo-European linguistics. He was for many years a professor and head of departments for linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and served as president of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Modern Language Association. Lehmann was also a pioneer in machine translation. He lectured a large number of future scholars at Austin, and was the author of several influential works on linguistics.
Anatoly Liberman is a linguist, medievalist, etymologist, poet, translator of poetry, and literary critic.
Eric Pratt Hamp was an American linguist widely respected as a leading authority on Indo-European linguistics, with particular interests in Celtic languages and Albanian. Unlike many Indo-Europeanists, who work entirely on the basis of written materials, he conducted extensive fieldwork on lesser-known Indo-European languages and dialects, such as Albanian, Arbëresh and Arvanitika; Breton; Welsh; Irish; Resian and Scots Gaelic.
Alexander (Sasha) Vladimirovich Vovin was a Soviet-born Russian-American linguist and philologist, and director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, France. He was a world-renowned linguist, well known for his research on East Asian languages.
Neilson Voyne Smith FBA, known as Neil Smith, was Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at University College London.
Robert A. Blust was an American linguist who worked in several areas, including historical linguistics, lexicography and ethnology. He was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Blust specialized in the Austronesian languages and made major contributions to the field of Austronesian linguistics.
The Tsouic languages are three Formosan languages, Tsou proper and the Southern languages Kanakanavu and Saaroa. The Southern Tsouic languages of Kanakanavu and Saaroa have the smallest phonemic inventories out of all the Formosan languages, with each language having only 13 consonants and 4 vowels. These two languages are highly endangered, as many Southern Tsouic speakers are shifting to Bunun and Mandarin Chinese.
Ruth Berman is an Israeli linguist, Professor Emerita, Tel Aviv University, where she held the chair in “Language across the Lifespan.” Berman's research deals with the morphology, syntax, and lexicon of Modern Hebrew, first language acquisition in cross-linguistic perspective, later language development, and development of narrative and text construction abilities from early childhood across adolescence and adulthood.
Jackson T.-S. Sun, also known as Jackson Tianshin Sun, is a Taiwanese linguist working on languages of the Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic families. He is best known for his pioneering documentation and historical-comparative work in Tani, Rgyalrongic, and Tibetic languages. Sun is a research fellow at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan.
Ronald Eaton Asher was a British linguist and educator specialised in Dravidian languages. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1964), a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1991), and an honorary fellow of the Sahitya Akademi.
Terttu Nevalainen is a Finnish linguist and the current Chair of English Philology at the University of Helsinki. She has been a member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences since 2001 and was inducted as a First Class Knight of the Order of the White Rose of Finland in 2015. Nevalainen works on corpus linguistics, the history of English and historical sociolinguistics.
Harry van der Hulst is full professor of linguistics and director of undergraduate studies at the department of linguistics of the University of Connecticut. He has been editor-in-chief of the international SSCI peer-reviewed linguistics journal The Linguistic Review since 1990 and he is co-editor of the series ‘Studies in generative grammar’. He is a Life Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and a board member of the European linguistics organization GLOW.
Raymond Kevin Hickey is an Irish linguist specialising in the English language in Ireland, especially in the capital Dublin, working within the sociolinguistic paradigm of language variation and change. Hickey has also worked on the Irish language, specifically the phonology of the modern language. For both Irish and English in Ireland he has carried out extensive fieldwork for over three decades.
Dwight Robert Ladd Jr, FBA, is a linguist and retired academic specialising in phonetics and phonology. From 1997 to 2011, he was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.
William Shi-Yuan Wang is a linguist, with expertise in phonology, the history of Chinese language and culture, historical linguistics, and the evolution of language in humans. He is Chair Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and National Taiwan Normal University, Emeritus Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, and Academician of Academia Sinica.
Laura J. Downing is an American linguist, specializing in the phonology of African languages.