Hans Kurath

HANS KURATH Hans Kurath, President of the Linguistic Society in 1942 and, through his teaching and research, a shaping influence in dialectology and lexicography, died in Ann Arbor on January 2, 1992, in his 101st year.* For his eightieth birthday, colleagues assembled a Festschrift containing, among other things, a list of Kurath's publications (Scholler & Reidy 1973) to which readers of this notice are directed. At the time of his retirement from the faculty of the University of Michigan, the official record was supplemented with an overview of his professional life, and, since Kurath himself added a few details omitted in an earlier version and approved the new wording of the whole, this document provides a useful introduction to his career as he saw its highlights: 'Hans Kurath, Professor of English and Editor of the Middle English Dictionary, entered upon his retirement on the first of this month [July 1, 1962] at the statutory age of seventy. A native of Villach, Austria, Professor Kurath came to the United States in 1907 and was naturalized in 1912. He received his undergraduate education at the Universities of Wisconsin and Texas and his graduate education at the Universities of Texas and Chicago, earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1920. The last-named institution further conferred an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree upon him in 1959. His early career embraced terms in the departments of German of the University of Texas and of Northwestern University . He was appointed Professor of German and Linguistics at Ohio State in 1927 and Professor of Germanics and Linguistics at Brown University in 1931. At Brown he served as Chairman of the Department of German until 1941, and Chairman of the Division of Modern Languages from that date until 1946. In the same year The University of Michigan invited him to join its Department of English Language and Literature and to undertake the duties he is now relinquishing. 'Professor Kurath's scholarly career was devoted chiefly to dialectology and lexicography. In 1930, partly on the basis ofhis monograph on American pronunciation in 1928, the American Council of Learned Societies appointed him Director of that monumental enterprise, the Linguistic Atlas of the United States. Outgrowths of this work which Professor Kurath himself compiled or edited are the Linguistic Atlas of New England (1939-43), A Word Geography ofthe Eastern United States (1949), and, with Raven McDavid, The Pronunciation ofEnglish in the Atlantic States (1961). Under Professor Kurath's direction, furthermore, the first twentyeight parts of the Middle English Dictionary, amounting to more than a third of the total, have at length been published. This dictionary, undertaken first at Stanford, later at Cornell, and since 1930 in Ann Arbor, has long been the most pressing single need of scholarship concerning English life and letters in the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. Professor Kurath also found time to serve as President of the Linguistic Society ofAmerica in 1941 [sic] and to direct the Society's annual Linguistic Institute from 1947 to 1950. And he continued to the end of his career to teach graduate seminars and direct doctoral theses. * I am grateful to the following for comments on a draft of this essay: Frederic G. Cassidy, William J. Gedney, Eric Hamp, Herbert Penzl, Warner G. Rice, Michael Silverstein, James Sledd, and Sarah G. Thomason. While I was writing this essay, Gertrude Kurath was unable to meet with me; she died on August 2, 1992. 797 798LANGUAGE, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 4 (1992) 'The final tribute to Professor Kurath will be the enduring use by the scholarly community of those works which his distinguished gifts of mind and powers of organization have made possible. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, the Linguistic Society of America appropriately dedicated to him the December 1961 issue oí Language. On campus, in the same year, his colleagues expressed their high esteem for him when they voted him the Distinguished Faculty Achievement award.' [In 1968 he received a second honorary doctorate, this one from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Though retired, Kurath accepted jointly with his successors the University of Michigan Press Book Award in 1972 for the Middle English Dictionary.] Kurath's career was...