Letters to Language

Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon either material published previously in the journal or issues deemed of importance to the field. The editor reserves the right to edit letters as needed. Brief replies from relevant parties are included as warranted.

M. B. Emeneau’s impact on linguistics and allied areas

April 10, 2006

To the Editor:

I read the obituary on Murray Barnson Emeneau (MBE) written by William Bright (Language 82.2.411–22, June 2006), kindly made available to me in an advance version, and felt that any description of Prof. Emeneau would be incomplete without an account of the huge impact his works have had on linguists worldwide. A scholar’s preeminence in any field is determined not only by the numerous contributions made by him to the discipline, but also and to a greater extent by the number of researchers who use these works as reference in their domain. Therefore, as a part of a centenary tribute to the scholar organized in Mysore in early 2005, the task of citation indexing was taken up to cover all his works, limiting the task to the available references and citing documents, and to bring together his bibliography and its citation in one place.

‘Citation indexing’ indicates the relationship that exists between the citing and the cited documents and provides an organized list of cited articles, each of which is accompanied by a list of citing articles identified by a source citation. This study mainly answered two questions: How many times was each of Emeneau’s works cited? And, who cited which work of his and where? The exercise generated an interesting set of results, and a brief summary of my study is as follows.

1. 1. In a span of approximately sixty years, MBE contributed 217 journal articles and 73 books. More than 70% of his contributions came during the first half of the eight decades starting from the 1930s. Within that, the maximum came in the 1960s. The years and numbers of contributions are as follows: 1930–39 (34), 1940–49 (56), 1950–59 (51), 1960–69 (71), 1970–79 (38), 1980–89 (31), 1990–99 (17), and 2000–2005 (6).

2. 2. The following authors have cited MBE more than ten times: M. B. Emeneau (255), that is, self-citation; Bh. Krishnamurti (119); P. S. Subramanyam (75); M. S. Andronov (44); H. F. Schiffman (33); H. S. Ananthanarayana (32); Inder Singh (24); B. Gopinathan Nair (23); M. C. Shapiro (19); Sanford B. Steever (19); Kamil V. Zvelebil (19); William Bright (14); R. Balakrishnan (13); Colin P. Masica (13); K. Meenakshi (13); S. Sakthivel (13); Rao G. Sambasiva (12); Thomas Burrow (10); and S. V. Shanmugham (10). This ranked list of citing authors indicates that MBE influenced Dravidianists such as Krishnamurti, Subramanyam, Andronov, and Schiffman, sociolinguists Shapiro and Steever, areal typologists such as Masica, and, of course, the Sanskritists Hock, Ananthanarayana, and others.

3. 3. While MBE debuted in the decade of the 1930s, citations of his articles began during the 1940s, numbering just 3, and gradually increased to 278 in the 1970s. The details year-wise are: 1940–49 (3), 1950–59 (10), 1960–69 (175), 1970–79 (278), 1980–89 (268), 1990–99 (262), and 2000ff. (215).

4. 4. Of the 1,204 works that have cited MBE, 610 are books, 497 are journal articles, and 97 are meeting/conference proceedings. Out of 497 citing journal articles, the International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics tops the list with 121 citations followed by: Indian Linguistics (57), Journal of the American Oriental Society (51), Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (34), Praci Bhasha Vijnan (33), Journal of Tamil Studies (29), Pondichery Journal of Dravidian Studies (24), Bulletin of the Anthropological Survey of India (24), Lingua (17), Anthropological Linguistics (14), Bulletin of the Deccan College Research Institute (12), and the rest are below 10 articles. Among the citing journals, though Indian journals top the list, when we take the total citing journals into consideration, we find a larger share of foreign journals than Indian in the ratio of 19:13...