[Ura-list] Paul Kokla in memoriam

[Johanna Laakso]

Dear URA-LIST community,

three days ago, the Estonian linguist Paul Kokla passed away. Born 1929 in Kärdla on the island of Hiiumaa, Kokla graduated from the university of Tartu in 1955; encouraged by professor Ariste, he started working on the Mari language and defended his dissertation on Mari possessive suffixes in 1964. Besides being one of the leading experts of Mari worldwide, he also worked as a lecturer of Estonian in Göttingen, Turku, and Pécs (in Pécs, he was also in charge of the Finno-Ugric department in the early 1990s) and edited Finnish-Estonian dictionaries. Moreover, Finno-Ugricists knew him as the editor and, later, editor-in-chief of the journal Sovetskoe Finno-Ugrovedenie, later Linguistica Uralica. After his retirement, he returned to his linguistic roots and compiled a dictionary of the Hiiumaa dialect, which appeared in 2015.

Paul Kokla was widely respected for his expertise and profound knowledge of various Uralic languages. He was member of several scholarly societies and expert bodies, including the Organizing Committee of the Congressus Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum. 

An obituary to Paul Kokla (in Estonian) has appeared at https://fennougria.ee/in-memoriam-paul-kokla-17-08-1929-16-05-2020/ <https://fennougria.ee/in-memoriam-paul-kokla-17-08-1929-16-05-2020/> .

With sincere condolences to the linguistic community of Estonia and to all friends and colleagues

jl

--
Univ.Prof. Dr. Johanna Laakso
Universität Wien, Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft (EVSL)
Abteilung Finno-Ugristik
Campus AAKH Spitalgasse 2-4 Hof 7
A-1090 Wien
johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at • http://homepage.univie.ac.at/Johanna.Laakso/
Project ELDIA: http://www.eldia-project.org/ 







-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ura-list/attachments/20200519/4b9b7510/attachment.htm>