History of US English by Wilson; MS needs a home

Sat Jun 13 17:15:24 UTC 2009

I think I can help here.  The best home for the manuscript of Elizabeth Wilson's father is probably the Western Historical Manuscript Collection, located at the University of Missouri-Columbia. (Its website is http://whmc.umsystem.edu).

Some 24 years ago I helpd bring the Peter Tamony Collection of Americanisms to the WHMC, and I know of at least one other linguist who donated his papers there.  My guess is that WHMC  would very much welcome the donation of the Wilson manuscript, and the staff there is very good at making all its material available to scholars.

Ms. Wilson may contact the WHMC directly and ask whatever questions she may have about WHMC and its handling of the materials entrusted to it (e-mail address/phone number/etc. are given at the website).  Or if she prefers that I make the contact for her, I'd be happy to do so.

If she has any questions she might want to ask me first, I'd of course be happy to answer them as best I can.

Gerald Cohen
Professor of German and Russian
(Research specialty: Etymology, various areas)
Department of Arts, Languages, and Philosophy
Missouri University of Science and Technology
(former name: University of Missouri-Rolla)
Rolla, MO 65409

e-mail: gcohen at mst.edu

________________________________

Message to American Dialect Society from Damien Hall (djh514 at york.ac.uk , Sat 6/13/2009 10:15 AM:

With apologies for cross-posting, I'm forwarding the following to the list
so that it gets read by the people who should read it: it appeared on the
LINGUIST list notice-board, an underused resource in my opinion. It's a
message from Elizabeth Wilson, whose father, a professor at Western
Washington U. whose name I'm afraid I don't know, had got apparently fairly
far with a MS of a history of US English before he died 14 years ago. Now,
Elizabeth wonders how to determine the work's value (academically or
monetarily) and what to do with it. Elizabeth's e-mail is

lochandlode at comcast.net

and her message follows.

Damien Hall

==== MESSAGE FROM ELIZABETH WILSON ====

Hello,

My father was a linguistics professor (I mean no disrespect if I'm supposed
to capitalize that) at Western Washington University. Before he passed away
he was working on a research project that he felt would be a significant
contribution, which was to be a textbook documenting the history of United
States English. It has been sitting in my basement for the last 14 years
because I don't know what to do with it. I don't know how to determine its
value either monetarily or academically.

Would anyone be willing to help me find someone who has an interest in this
subject and potentially using some or all of his research? I've looked at
what he's written and don't even really know how to characterize it. There
pages and pages of words, pronunciations, word origins, and references to
Old Middle English, Late Middle English, and a few maps of Scandinavia,
Britain and so on and so forth.

Thank you for your time,

Elizabeth Wilson

--
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
YORK
YO10 5DD
UK

Tel. (office) +44 (0)1904 432665
     (mobile) +44 (0)771 853 5634
Fax  +44 (0)1904 432673

http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb/
http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/lang/people/pages/hall.htm

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