Carleton Taylor Hodge

How vividly I recall the feeling of eager anticipation looking forward to the well-organized and informative lectures Professor Carleton Hodge presented in his ‘Structure of Ancient Egyptian’ course at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Linguistic Institute of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor during the summer of 1965. I was a graduate student in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley at the time, taking his and three other courses. Little did I imagine then that he and I would maintain a lively correspondence from that summer on for the next thirty-three years, nor did I expect that we would come to spend so much time together at the joint annual meetings of the American Oriental Society and the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics, which we would regularly attend for a quarter of a century. We also lectured on each other’s campuses, and I took great delight that many of my fellow Californians personally came to appreciate not only his scholarship (Hodge 1991a and 1991c), but also his charming and celebrated wit and sense of humor.

Hodge was born on November 27, 1917 to Clarence Sim and Nina (Eaton) Hodge in Springfield, Illinois, where he was raised. He died on September 8, 1998 at the age of eighty at his home in Bloomington, Indiana, where he was Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Anthropology at Indiana University (IU).¹ He left Illinois in 1935 to attend Depauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, as a Rector Scholar. In those days, he was interested in biblical studies and majored in Greek and Latin, receiving his A.B. Phi Beta Kappa in 1939. During his sophomore year, however, he decided to become a linguist, since he was much influenced (especially at informal Saturday night meetings on anthropological linguistics) by a new member of the Depauw faculty, Charles (Carl) F. Voegelin, Professor of Anthropology. Voegelin was to become Hodge’s lifelong friend, mentor, and colleague at IU. At Voegelin’s urging, Hodge attended the linguistic institutes at the University of Michigan in 1938,² 1939, and 1940, studying with such giants as Edgar Sturtevant, Roland G. Kent, Franklin Edgerton, and Voegelin himself, who taught field methods courses using Delaware and Ojibway. In addition, Hodge was fortunate enough to hear lectures by Leonard Bloomfield.

Hodge began his graduate career in linguistics and Oriental studies in fall 1939, at the University of Pennsylvania (where he was a Harrison Scholar and later Fellow) studying with such luminaries as E. A. Speiser (Akkadian, Hebrew, and Urartean), Giorgio Della Vida (Arabic), and W. Norman Brown (Sanskrit). He completed his dissertation under Zellig S. Harris on Hausa (published as Hodge 1947) receiving the Ph.D. in linguistics in 1943. Later that year on June 2, he married Patricia E. Sutcliffe, with whom he had four children.³ They were a devoted couple, and attended many linguistic conferences together, where they could often be seen walking together in and around the hotel. I fondly recall speaking with her at many of those.

Hodge’s first home and position were, strangely enough, in Bloomington, Indiana, where he would later spend most of his career. He was hired by IU for 1943–44 as an instructor of Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian in the Army Specialized Training Program. The next two years took him to the University of Maryland, College Park, back to the University of Pennsylvania, and to New York City where he worked on the aforementioned Slavic languages and also on Japanese. He was asked to supervise classes in Japanese which used a prepublication version of a manual on the language by Bernard Bloch and Eleanor Harz Jordan.

In the fall of 1946 he joined the U.S. State Department, which had a program for foreign service officers, headed by Henry Lee Smith, Jr. Hodge worked for the next sixteen years on pedagogical materials using informants of Bulgarian, Modern Greek, Hausa (Hodge 1963b), Persian (both Iranian and Afghan dialects), Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish, and also served as the editor of FSI language materials (the Foreign Service Institute [FSI] was created by the Foreign Service Act of 1946). Three significant articles...