Kenneth L. Pike

Upon the death of Charles Fries, Kenneth Pike wrote ‘A shade tree has fallen’ (1997.4:201). Now this phrase must refer to Pike himself.¹

Pike has already been honored in many ways. He was president of LSA in 1961, and received a number of honorary degrees, was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. The many diverse branches of his studies, life, writings, thoughts, deeds, and character have reached far indeed. It is impossible to do justice to these in any significant detail, and the degree to which his contributions have been felt has already been recognized by many. This then is a very personal attempt to summarize just a few of his branches.²

It is impossible to isolate Pike’s linguistics and his life aims, so I will not attempt to do so here. Early in his life it was obvious to all that he was a ‘natural’ linguist. Having joined the Wycliffe Bible Translators (and later its sister organization the Summer Institute of Linguistics) after graduating from Gordon College and being rejected for missionary service in China (on the basis of his health), he began to study the Mixteco language in Mexico. With scanty informal training, he found to his surprise that he was attempting to analyze a tonal language, and he proceeded to do so with remarkable ability.³

Recognizing Pike’s abilities, W. Cameron Townsend, his director in Wycliffe, arranged for him to attend early LSA institutes at the University of Michigan—where personal contacts with Bloomfield, Bloch, Sapir, Fries, Twaddell, Hockett, and many others were to permanently influence him.⁴

Charles Fries became Pike’s mentor, and was influential in his completing a PhD in linguistics at Michigan, as well as obtaining positions there. Pike’s dissertation on phonetics was one of the outstanding dissertations of its time. First published in 1943, and translated into a number of other languages, Phonetics is still in print—a remarkable achievement of longevity! After graduation Pike was appointed to the faculty, with a unique arrangement of oscillation between teaching on the campus and frequent leaves-of-absence to do fieldwork in Mexico (and later, elsewhere, helping his Wycliffe/SIL colleagues with their problems in the analyses of indigenous languages throughout the world).⁵

Besides his teaching duties, Pike served briefly as chair of the Linguistics Department and director of the English Language Institute at Michigan, and also as president of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, directing its summer courses at the University of Oklahoma for many years.

In SIL, Pike at first devoted himself strictly to phonology, and published a good deal on that area, including Phonemics (1947a)—widely used in classrooms for years after its appearance. At the SIL summer courses, Pike took over the leadership of the grammatical work after Eugene Nida’s departure for the American Bible Society’s translation department. His turn to grammar did not begin here, of course—he had, for example, already written his now classic paper ‘Grammatical prerequistes to phonemic analysis’ (1947b). Contrary to the post-Bloomfieldians, he strongly disagreed that one should finish describing phonetics and phonemics before turning to morphology, and still later, syntax, leaving semantics as something outside of linguistics proper. His early tagmemic formulation posited three hierarchies (phonology, grammar, lexicon) which, although separate, had many intersecting relationships between them which also had to be specified.

Pike and colleagues finished translating the New Testament into Mixteco in the late 1940s, after which he spent his leaves from the university mainly consulting on indigenous language analyses in South America, Africa, India, and Indonesia. His alternation between teaching and fieldwork resulted in a useful relationship between the two occupations. Rarely, if ever, would you find Pike making false universal statements about language features, and, during this time he was undoubtedly the only linguist with such extensive and varied language contact. Pike’s varied experience shaped tagmemic theory into an extremely useful tool for on-the-spot language analyses, and it is still used as such by many. Literally hundreds of items have been published within that theory, some of which are included in bibliographies of the...