William G. Moulton

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William Gamwell Moulton, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Germanic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, passed away on June 2, 2000, in Exeter, New Hampshire, at the age of eighty-six. Professor Moulton served as a member of the executive committee of the Linguistic Society of America, as well as its vice president, and, in 1967, its president.

Moulton was born February 5, 1914, in Providence, RI. Like so many linguists of his generation, he came to the field by way of an interest in—and exceptional talent for—languages. As he himself put it in an autobiographical essay, ‘[i]n my day, no one planned to “become a linguist”: we all stumbled into it, entering by the back door, because there was no front door’ (Moulton 1980:60). Moulton’s path toward linguistics was anything but stumbling. Already as a boy he was an assiduous student of Latin, French, and German. He began his undergraduate education at Princeton in 1931 where he pursued a dual degree in French and German, as well as a program in international relations. He was awarded a bachelor’s degree with first-class honors in 1935. After graduating from Princeton, Moulton received a scholarship to study languages for a year at the University of Berlin. During that year he met Jenni Karding, whom he married on July 7, 1938.

In 1936 Moulton enrolled at Yale for graduate study, where he began work with Eduard Prokosch. In those days, Yale was clearly THE place to study linguistics as it emerged from traditional philology.

It actually took me the better part of a year to discover ‘linguistics’ at Yale. It began with the Gothic course which I took from Prokosch. Then, somewhere during that first year, I discovered that there was at Yale a professor named Edward Sapir. Though he was on leave during my second year, I took his course in phonetics and phonemics in the fall of 1938—shortly before his death in early 1939. By this time I had also had the sense to take courses with Edgar H. Sturtevant (for Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin) and with Franklin B. Edgerton (for a year of Sanskrit). Prokosch died in an auto accident in the summer of 1938, but he was in a sense replaced by his son-in-law Hans Kurath who for two years came two days a week from Brown University to teach courses in Germanic linguistics. There may have been very few students of linguistics in Yale in those years, but we were hardly underprivileged. What a galaxy of stars: Prokosch, Sapir, Sturtevant, Edgerton and Kurath!

(Moulton 1980:59)

In 1940 Leonard Bloomfield came to Yale and supervised Moulton as he completed the dissertation project begun under Prokosch. The following year, Moulton finished his dissertation, Swiss German dialect and Romance patois, which was published that same year as a supplement (17.4) to Language (Moulton 1941). This monograph, one of the very first to examine the structural effects of language contact in a rigorous way, advanced the frontiers of German dialectology and structural linguistics more generally by examining the role of Germanic-Romance contact in the historical development of sound systems in the Wallis/Valais region of Switzerland. It also established Moulton’s reputation among German-speaking Swiss scholars as one of the pioneers in Swiss German dialectology, a reputation that endures today.

While Moulton’s dissertation marked his entry into the fields of Swiss German dialectology and contact linguistics, he came to his topic by way of a straightforward historical linguistic question pertaining to Old High German vocalism.

One day in the spring of 1938 the late Professor Eduard Prokosch of Yale University suggested that I might find a topic for my doctoral dissertation in the general field of Old High German final vowels. In going through the work that has been done on this subject, the greatest stumbling block which I found was the assumption, made by many scholars, that certain final vowels must have been long in OHG because they still survive in a few modern dialects, especially in southwestern Switzerland. When I turned...