29.4937, All: Obituary for Charles Gilman

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4937. Wed Dec 12 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.4937, All:  Obituary for Charles Gilman

Moderator: linguist at linguistlist.org (Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Helen Aristar-Dry, Robert Coté)
Homepage: https://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Sarah Robinson <srobinson at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2018 10:41:23
From: Salikoko Mufwene [everett at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Obituary for Charles Gilman

 
5 September 1941 - 3 October 2018

It is with a great deal of sorrow that I report the death of a former mentor,
Charles Gilman, for whom I worked as a teaching assistant at the National
University of Zaïre, during the 1973-74 academic year. He played an important
role in helping me and some other then Zairian students get prepared for
graduate training in the United States, advising me especially to apply to the
University of Chicago to work with the late James D. McCawley at the peak of
Generative Semantics.

Charles studied creolistics at Northwestern University, under Morris Goodman.
His dissertation, defended in 1972, was titled The Comparative Structure in
French, English and Cameroonian Pidgin English: An Exercise in Linguistic
Comparison. It was based on field research he had conducted in Cameroon during
the 1960s, when he worked there as an English teacher. After graduation, he
spent a total of 18 years teaching at various universities in Africa,
including the then National University of Zaïre, the National University of
Rwanda, and Bunda College (in Malawi). He spent most of the rest of this
post-graduate life working as a partner of his wife Ruth Kornfield at Rainbow
Bridge Consulting. They traveled to various places in Africa and Asia, before
returning to the US, in Eugene, Oregon, when he was struck by cancer. He
succumbed to this on 3 October 2018, surrounded by Ruth, his daughter Lisa,
and his son Paul, as well as his grand-children.

Charles was a very humble man, who also didn’t promote some of his innovating
thinking, as he seems to have refrained from the polemics that have marked
genetic creolistics. He was the first creolist to my knowledge to invoke
“selection” in his essay “Pidgin languages: Form Selection or Simplification?”
published at Indiana University Linguistics Club (1985). This paper,
originally presented at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Tenth Annual
Linguistics Symposium, in 1981, definitely contributed to my
competition-and-selection approach to the emergence of creoles, when I turned
to evolutionary biology and macroecology to elaborate my 1986 position that
the substratist and universalist hypotheses complement each other.

In 1983, at the 29th Southeast Conference on Linguistics, in Atlanta, Charles
hypothesized that forms such as wuda ‘would have’ and cuda ‘could have’ in
English creoles have their origins not in would of and could of, as often
claimed by amateur historical dialectologists, but evolved from would’ve and
could’ve, as attested in some current nonstandard English dialects.
(Interestingly, the contracted ’ve < have and the weakened of sound alike,
while the contracted have is grammatically more likely in this syntactic
environment.) The article from the presentation was published as “Had've: A
New Auxiliary?” in the SECOL Review 9.9-23 (1985).

He toyed with the idea of “Pidgins as Performance, Competence, and Language”
in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language 38.19-30 (1982) and
thought of “Cameroonian Pidgin English [as] a Neo-African Language” in
Readings in Creole Studies, ed. by Ian F. Hancock, Edgar Polomé, Morris
Goodman, & Bernd Heine, published at Ghent: Story-Scientia 269-280 (1979).
Cameroon Pidgin English is indeed indigenous to Africa, regardless of whether
it should be characterized as a neo-Germanic language variety or one without
genetic affiliation, owing to the extensive African substrate influence on it.
Creolists are still divided on the issue of the genetic classification of
creoles. 

Other noteworthy contributions of his to genetic creolistics include “African
Areal Features: Sprachbund, not Substrate,” published in the inaugural issue
of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 1.33-50 (1986) and “Black
Identity, Homeostasis, and Survival: African and Metropolitan Speech Varieties
in the New World,” published in Africanisms in Afro-American Language
Varieties, ed. by Salikoko S. Mufwene, 388-402, Athens: the University of
Georgia Press (1993). I was privileged to co-author with him “How African is
Gullah and Why?” in American Speech 62. 120-139 (1987).

I feel very fortunate to have crossed paths with Charles, as he taught me to
be a critical reader and an inter-disciplinary scholar, as well as how to
navigate my way in the American academic environment. He remained a good
friend, not in the least patronizing despite the professor-assistant context
in which we first met, very supportive though detached from the polemics in
which I have been embroiled regarding the emergence of creoles. If anything,
he was amused by the tone of the debates. I will miss the friend and the
well-balanced scholar and family man he was, moreover a feminist who strongly
supported his wife’s ambitions.

Salikoko S. Mufwene
The University of Chicago
 


Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:

              The IU Foundation Crowd Funding site:
       https://iufoundation.fundly.com/the-linguist-list

               The LINGUIST List FundDrive Page:
            https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4937	
----------------------------------------------------------