Emeneau, Murray Barnson 1904–2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born February 28, 1904, in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada; died August 29, 2005, in Berkeley, CA. Linguist, educator, and author. Emeneau, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, was acclaimed for his groundbreaking work in non-literary dialects in India and for his research on now-extinct native Californian languages. A brilliant student from an early age, he studied Latin, French, and German in high school, then proceeded to major in Greek and Latin at Dalhousie University. After earning a B.A. there in 1923, he attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, earning a second B.A. in 1926 and, in 1935, an M.A. Between these two degrees, he also completed a Ph.D. at Yale University in 1931. During the late 1920s, Emeneau was an instructor at Yale, and from 1931 to 1940 he worked there as a research scholar. During the 1930s he came under the influence of prominent linguist Edward Sapir, who encouraged Emeneau to travel to India and research dialects there. Emeneau did so, learning the Kota, Badaga, Kolami, and Toda languages, which led to such works as Kota Texts (1944–46), A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (1961), Studies in Indian Linguistics (1968), the edited Toda Songs (1971), and Toda Grammar and Texts (1984). After joining the Berkeley faculty in 1940 as an assistant professor, Emeneau's next major project was the study of Vietnamese. This resulted in his writing a grammar book on the language, as well as penning several other related publications. By 1946 Emeneau was already a full professor of Sanskrit and general linguistics at Berkeley. While at the university, he also established the Survey of California Indian Languages; he spent several decades studying extinct native tongues. After retiring in 1971, when he received the prestigious Berkeley Citation from the university, Emeneau continued to publish for many more years. Among his last publications are Sanskrit Studies: Selected Papers (1988) and Dravidian Studies: Selected Papers (1994).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

San Francisco Chronicle, September 12, 2005, p. B4.

ONLINE

Berkeley Linguistics Department Web site, http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/ (October 26, 2005).