Obituary: David D. Thomas (1930 ?2006)- Southeast Asia Linguist

[Brian L Migliazza]

Dear all,

We are sorry to inform you of the passing of our good friend and 
colleague, David D. Thomas, who died on April 14, 2006 after a long battle 
with Parkinson¹s disease.
You can find his obituary on the SIL website at 
<www.sil.org/linguistics/personnel/ThomasObit.html>.
There is also a page of remembrances at 
<www.sil.org/linguistics/personnel/ThomasRemembrances.html>, 
where you can add your memories for posting, by emailing them to 
<International_Linguistics at sil.org>.

Brian Migliazza
------------------------------------------------------


David D. Thomas (1930?2006)- Southeast Asia Linguist
Obituary: www.sil.org/linguistics/personnel/ThomasObit.html
Remembrances: www.sil.org/linguistics/personnel/ThomasRemembrances.html

SIL International mourns the loss of one of its eminent linguists, David 
Thomas, who passed away on April 14, 2006 at the age of 76 in North 
Carolina. David will be remembered for his outstanding contributions to 
linguistics and Mon-Khmer languages, for his energetic teaching, for his 
field work in mainland Southeast Asia, and for his service as mentor to a 
great number of students and to his junior colleagues.

David Thomas, was a leading pioneer in Mon-Khmer (Austro-Asiatic) 
linguistics. It may be difficult to appreciate now in the 21st century 
just how little was known about this Southeast Asian family of languages 
when he arrived in Vietnam in the 1950?s to begin research.  Respected 
scholars were still, following Pater Wilhelm Schmidt, classifying Chamic 
languages as Mon-Khmer? an issue laid to rest by Richard Pittman in 1959.  
The sub-groupings of Mon-Khmer languages were vague and had little 
empirical basis.  Thomas, acknowledging the great French scholarly 
tradition in Indo-China and celebrating especially the ground-breaking 
work of Haudricourt, set about with his colleagues both to study in detail 
and to classify the many Montagnard groups in the region.  He, along with 
Prof. Nguyen Dinh Hoa, formed the Linguistic Circle of Saigon, which in 
turn launched the journal Mon-Khmer Studies in 1964. 
Thomas was a student of the classic comparative linguistic method, having 
studied with some of the best in the field at the University of 
Pennsylvania.  Historically, he sought to understand the possible Chamic 
migration effects that appeared to have ?split? South Bahnaric groups from 
North Bahnaric ones.  He was keenly interested in explanations for the 
variegated manifestations of Mon-Khmer phonological register systems. He 
accurately judged that while reconstructing proto consonants in Mon-Khmer 
would turn out to be relatively straightforward, the convoluted evolution 
of register-related vocalic systems in the daughter languages would pose a 
huge challenge.
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