Death of Isidore Dyen

[John Ulrich Wolff]

	Isidore Dyen, the pioneer American Austronesianist, passed 
away on December 15, 2008, at the age of 94. He trained as an 
Indo-European and Sanskrit scholar under Norman Brown at the 
University of Pennsylvania, but became interested in Austronesian 
after Leonard Bloomfield assigned him to prepare the Malay section of 
the US Army pedagogical series during World War II. He was appointed 
to the faculty of Yale University for this project and in 1948 
introduced the first Indonesian language instruction in the United 
States. He was best known for his massive lexico-statistical study, 
comparing close to 400 Austronesian languages from across the board, 
in all possible pairs, in order to come up with a genetic 
classification of the Austronesian languages. He was active in many 
other aspects of the historical study of the Austronesian languages 
to his death, and participated in the most recent international 
conference on Austronesian linguistics 10-ICAL, in Palawan, 
Philippines in 2006, presenting a paper that has subsequently been 
published.
His most valuable contribution to Austronesian linguistics, in my 
opinion, is his work from 1946 through 1957, when he wrote a series 
of articles and a monograph, reanalyzing Dempwolff's data, 
determining the correct correspondences  for the apical and palatal 
consonants and for what he called the "laryngeals" *h and *? (now 
reconstructed as *S and *q).
	Professor Dyen trained many of the foremost Austronesianists 
of our generation and devoted extraordinary time and effort into 
guiding his students.. Without him historical Austronesian 
linguistics could not have come as far as it has.
John Wolff
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