Robert Austerlitz

Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.

Robert Austerlitz died 9 September 1994. What follows is intended as a concise celebration of his memory; it focuses on his development and activity as a linguist.¹

Robert Paul Austerlitz was born 13 December 1923 in Bucharest, of an Austrian father who had moved to Romania from Brünn, Moravia, and an American mother who had Bohemian roots. But he grew up at the intersection of Transylvania and Muntenia, in Braşov (= Kronstadt = Brassó), a city whose names—which he later etymologized (1975b)—reflected its linguistic complexity. The three main layers of its population consisted of Germans (Saxons had settled there in the thirteenth century, as well as Austrians from the seventeenth, and others in the twentieth), Hungarians, and Romanians, and Austerlitz learned German, Hungarian, and Romanian in that order. More significant for his development than the multilingual situation was Braşov’s cultural intricacy: the Hungarian population alone, for example, was fragmented into Roman Catholic, Reformed (Calvinist), Lutheran (Evangelical), and Unitarian confessions. This environment proved an ideal laboratory for observation and taxonomizing, an environment in which his father was able to pass on to him an early appreciation—again, not so much linguistic but general-anthropologic and kinesic—for human diversity. Austerlitz attended German elementary and Romanian (Orthodox) secondary school (Liceul Andrei Şaguna, where his French and Latin teachers were particularly influential). During his four years at the liceu, Austerlitz’s perspective was that of an outsider—he was just beginning to learn Romanian—and this perspective gave him a critical edge, allowing him to admix insight with sympathy.

When Austerlitz arrived in New York in 1938 just before his fifteenth birthday, he was thus already equipped with a fusion of what used to be called Western and Eastern European, Old World culture. Within a week of his arrival he was attending Stuyvesant High School, and over the next eight years he rapidly internalized New World, chiefly North American, high and popular culture (making deliveries for a Fifth Avenue chemist, service in the US Army, playing organ in Texas and jazz piano in New Orleans). His undergraduate work, begun at Washington Square College (NYU) and interrupted by the war, was resumed briefly at Loyola before he returned to New York in the summer of 1946. Here he explored philosophy at the New School for Social Research (it is revealing that the title of his B.A. essay was ‘Synchronic and diachronic as linguistic categories’) and simultaneously, at the insistance of Elliot van Kirk Dobbie of the English Department at Columbia University, Austerlitz began the study of linguistics. In May of 1950 he was awarded the B.A. from the New School and, one month later, in June, the M.A. from Columbia. The title of his (unpublished) M.A. thesis is Phonemic analysis of Hungarian (1950). Notice that this is the same year as Alarcos Llorach 1950, and just one year after Roman Jakobson and János Lotz had published their ‘Notes on the French phonemic pattern’ (1949). The thesis was a little masterpiece. Viewed a half century on, it is a landmark.

At Columbia, Austerlitz studied Old English with Dobbie in 1947, then Turkic with Karl Menges and Indo-European, via Gothic, with André Martinet. The turning point came, however, with Austerlitz’s study (primarily of Samoyed and Hungarian) under János Lotz. (Lotz had been lured to New York by Roman Jakobson; they had worked and associated amicably, together with Wolfgang Steinitz, at weekly seminars in Sweden during the war.) In very short order, Lotz communicated to Austerlitz his expertise in, and passion for, a broad spectrum of areas including descriptive grammar of the Uralic languages, Hungarian philology, and metrics. One element in the complex chemistry which allowed such a rapid and broad-banded transmission may well have been the fact that Lotz’s background was in some ways similar, though in the reverse, to Austerlitz’s: born in the US of Hungarian parents, Lotz had been transplanted to Hungary at the age of seven.

After 1950, Austerlitz quickened the pace even more. In the summer of 1951...