Thomas A. Sebeok

On December 21, 2001, Professor Thomas Albert Sebeok passed away peacefully at his home in Bloomington, Indiana. Over his illustrious career as semiotician and linguist, his writings cast a spell on a whole generation of young scholars and colleagues, influencing both theory and practice within the two interrelated fields. Without him, they will never be the same. He brought not only outstanding scholarship to both, but also an enthusiasm and joie that made them interesting in and of themselves. He loved everything about semiotics and its practice. We have all lost a guide and teacher; but his spirit lives on in the content of courses and in the ideas that are put forward and debated within and outside of semiotics and linguistics.

By his own admission Thomas Sebeok was not the prototypical scholar, one who takes on a narrow topic and studies it to its most profound depths. He liked to characterize himself as an academic Apis mellifera who darts ‘solitary from flower to flower, sipping nectar, gathering pollen from flowers, serendipitously fertilizing whatever [he touches]’ (Sebeok 1995:121). His scholarly career progressed not linearly, but rather by ever-widening centrifugal movements. The insatiable intellectual curiosity, astounding working capacity, and ease of writing that would yield more than 450 books and articles manifested itself early: by age twenty-three he had published nine articles.

Sebeok entered the world in Budapest in 1920. After a brilliant secondary career at Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium (a premier breeding ground for Nobel Prize winners), his father sent him to learn English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. As a sixteen year-old, his initial encounter with the English language was not auspicious, as he was fond of recalling:

An initial handicap to overcome was that I didn’t know a word of English then . . . I still clearly recall both the first full English sentence I orally encoded and the first full sentence I aurally decoded. When I got hungry that evening, I walked to the nearest Lyons and said to the waitress: ‘I vant to become a sanvich’; to which she, thinking that I was an ill-trained German spy, lobbed back, ‘Can’t ‘elp you guvnor’.

(p.c.)

After a brief stay in England, Sebeok immigrated to the United States and matriculated at the University of Chicago, where he enrolled in a semiotics course taught by Charles Morris. He earned a Ph.D. in oriental languages and civilizations at Princeton. But with a firm grounding in American structuralism acquired in Leonard Bloomfield ’s classes at Chicago, he also commuted to Columbia to pursue his studies of linguistics under the tutelage of Roman Jakobson, his dissertation director, whose broader views on the place of language within the humanities and social sciences would shape Sebeok’s intellectual development.

In 1943 the twenty-four-year-old doctor and us arrived in Bloomington to assist the Ameridianist Carl Voegelin in managing the country’s largest Army Specialized Training Program in foreign languages. As enrollment swelled into the thousands and the number of less-taught tongues rose to fifteen, he took over the helm. During that period he also participated in the famous Broadway Project in which linguists were entrusted with the task of developing pedagogical materials to support instruction in the less-taught languages that had never been taught in universities, as well as in the spoken varieties of commonly taught languages like French and German disdained by the philologists and literary scholars who staffed the foreign language programs of academia in his era. At war’s end some academic home had to be found for this interdisciplinary scholar par excellence. He was assigned to teach courses in English composition and world literature in the Department of English. His itinerary at Indiana University would eventually include stops in a half-dozen academic or research units spanning domains of the language sciences currently divided into five departments, in addition to teaching assignments in the medical school housed on the campus of the current Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. While teaching the rhetorical arts to young Hoosiers, Sebeok broadened his knowledge of anthropological linguistics by fieldwork on the Wisconsin Winnebago and the Bolivian...