M. B. Emeneau, 1904-2005, President of the Society, 1954-51, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal, 1949-51.

• Author: Krishnamurti, Bh.
• Position: Bibliography - Obituary

Murray Barnson Emeneau, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and Sanskrit at the University of California, Berkeley, was the longest-lived Indologist and anthropological linguist of great distinction of the twentieth century. In the early hours of August 29, 2005, he died in his sleep at the age of 101 in his house in Berkeley, California. His life was a saga of scholarly dedication and prolific writing on a variety of indological themes in general, and Dravidian in particular. His Indian students had always looked upon him as a guru of the true Indian gurukula tradition. This writer was one of them. (1)

Emeneau's forefathers, who were seafarers, migrated to Halifax, Canada, from the Payee de Montbeliard (which later became a part of France) in the middle of the eighteenth century and were among the first settlers in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, along with other English, German, and Swiss Protestants. Emeneau was born on February 28, 1904 in Lunenburg. His father's death in 1912 left "the family very poor," and his "mother worked hard to make ends meet" (Emeneau 1991b: 91). Consequently, Emeneau evolved as a self-made person, who rose to great heights of eminence in his later life by dint of hard work. Emeneau stood first in his province in high school and was helped by a parliament member to go to college on a four-year scholarship. He received his B.A. Honors in Classics from Dalhousie University in 1923. He then went to Balliol College at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned a second bachelor's degree with honors in 1926. On his return, he went to Yale Graduate School as Instructor in Latin and continued his study of classics. He studied Sanskrit with George Bobrinskoy and was attracted to specialize further in it, in addition to comparative Indo-European. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1931, his dissertation an edition and translation with critical notes of Jambhaladatta's version of Vetalapancavimsati (a collection of Sanskrit folktales). This was published by the American Oriental Society in 1934. He studied Indo-European grammar, Sanskrit, and anthropological linguistics with such great scholars and teachers at Yale as E. H. Sturtevant, Franklin Edgerton, and Edward Sapir. Emeneau says he benefited from Sapir's courses on phonetics and field methods, which offered "virtuoso training in sounds which could be heard, learned and reproduced" (1991b: 94). Owing to the bleak prospects for a teaching position for a classicist to teach Sanskrit because of the "Great Depression," he was helped by his teachers to get fellowships to go to India for the next three years. Edward Sapir suggested that he study the Toda language in the Nilgiri hills in India. He had adequate training in anthropological linguistics from Sapir and had exposure to structural linguistics from Bloomfield before his long trip to India. Emeneau said (1991b: 95):

It was the two teachers, Sapir and Bloomfield, from whom I learned the "modern" linguistics of the 30s--from Sapir in person as a teacher, and from Bloomfield's writings and later informal contacts.... I feel myself as a pupil of both men ... During 1935-38 he visited India and did extensive fieldwork on the language and culture of several nonliterary Dravidian languages of South and Central India, mostly Toda and Kota and for a shorter period Badaga in the Nilgiri hills, Kodagu in Karnataka, and Kolami in Central India. On a short visit to northwest India (now Pakistan), he collected data on Brahui. It must be noted that when he did fieldwork in India, there were no tape-recorders, and all his recording and transcription were in longhand based on his sharp ear. (2) After his return from India in 1938, Emeneau continued at Yale, teaching linguistics and classics. In 1940, consequent on the sudden death of the Professor of Sanskrit, Arthur Ryder, Emeneau was appointed by the University of California, Berkeley, as Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Sanskrit in the Department of Classics. He became Associate Professor in 1943 and was elevated to Professor in 1946. He became the founding Chair of the Department of Linguistics from 1953 to 1958 (3) and was Chair of the Classics Department from 1959 to 1962. He served the Linguistics Department until his retirement in 1971, after which he continued his association with the University of California as Emeritus Professor of Sanskrit and Linguistics.

Emeneau's range of scholarship and publications spanned many disciplines and interdisciplinary areas, involving linguistics, prehistory, anthropology, ethnology, onomastics, folklore studies, etc., with special reference to two major language families of India, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan. With 286 published items consisting of 28 books, 99 reviews (covering 113 books), 148 research papers, and 11 miscellaneous items (see complete bibliography at the end), he made a mark on almost every branch of Indology. (4) The impact of his work on the world of scholarship has been considerable. A survey of his publications by decades shows that his scholarly output gradually increased and reached its peak during 1961-70, and he remained productive into his mid-nineties.

The first major fruit of his fieldwork in India was Kota Texts in four volumes (1944a, 1946a, b, c). As a part of the war effort he also worked on Vietnamese and produced teaching materials and a grammar (1944b, c, 1945a, b). He was fascinated by the Toda language and culture, which were unlike those of any other tribe in India. He reminisces about what his guru, Sapir, taught him, as follows (1991: 95):

What Sapir gave me ... was a sense of language as man's culminating cultural instrument. When I encountered the Todas, whose chief and all-absorbing esthetic experience was their extempore songs sung on all cultural occasions, I knew that it was this that Sapir was talking about, and his teaching led me towards copious recording and subsequent analysis. His stupendous volume Toda Songs (1971a), with 245 songs with translation and ethnographic explanations (followed by a concordance of song-units and indices), was a groundbreaking work in Toda ethnopoetics, which has no parallel even in the major literary languages of India. Another monograph-length paper, "Ritual Structure and Language Structure of the Todas" (1974a), draws parallels between language and cultural practices. He apparently spent most of his first year in India studying Toda, the language on which he has the largest number of publications (two books and twenty-two papers). His knowledge of Sanskrit combined with his intensive study of the South Indian tribal texts and culture led to a spate of publications on Old Indo-Aryan and Dravidian between 1937 and 1960, on diverse topics involving Sanskrit folktales, textual criticism, Toda, Kota, Kodagu ritual practices and kinship organization, and reviews of Sanskrit texts on literature and poetics. His papers on linguistics and ethnology during the earlier years of his career were collected in a volume Dravidian Linguistics, Ethnology and Folktales: Collected Papers (Annamalai University 1967a).

Edward Sapir, while suggesting to Emeneau to study the Toda language in India during 1935-38, hoped that he might get into the study of comparative Dravidian, as indeed he did (1991b: 96). Emeneau's first paper on comparative Dravidian was a study of the verbs 'come' and 'give' in Dravidian (1945c) and his last paper dealt with the developments of Proto-Dravidian *r in Toda (2002). In between he published nearly thirty significant papers dealing with comparative phonology (see mainly 1953b, 1961c, 1969b, 1970b, 1971d, 1980h, 1988b, 1995), some aspects of morphology (1953d, 1961b, 1967b, 1968d, 1975a), criteria for subgrouping South Dravidian (1967b), besides two monographs: a study of the place of Brahui in comparative Dravidian grammar (1962b) and a sketch of Dravidian comparative phonology (1970a). His Kolami, a Dravidian Language (1955a) deals with an analysis of Kolami descriptively (structurally in Bloomfieldian terms) and also discusses its place in Central Dravidian, as well as providing an etymological index of Kolami words. He published a comprehensive grammar of Toda with copious texts (1984b), almost forty-six years after completing his fieldwork on the language. His important papers on comparative Dravidian up to 1991 were published as a volume entitled Dravidian Studies: Selected Papers (1994).

There are two major areas where Emeneau's scholarly contributions have left an especially lasting imprint.

(1) Beginning in the late forties he collaborated with Thomas Burrow, Professor of Sanskrit, Oxford University, on the preparation of an etymological dictionary of the Dravidian languages. Burrow had already published several important papers on comparative Dravidian phonology, treating such problems as the developments of Proto-Dravidian *k, *c, *n, and *y in different languages, alternations of i/e and u/o in root syllables in South Dravidian, word-initial voicing in stops, as well as the problem of Dravidian borrowings into Indo-Aryan from the earliest times ("Dravidian Studies" I-VII, BSO(A)S 9-12, TPS 1945, 1946). Burrow and Emeneau had been collecting cognates independently for their research from nearly twenty published sources of the Dravidian languages for some years; they then decided in 1949 to come together to work on a Dravidian etymological dictionary. Emeneau had already an enormous corpus of vocabulary from the non-literary languages of South India. Burrow visited India four times during 1950-66 and collected data on Parji, Kui, Kuvi, Gondi, Pengo, and Manda in central India, accompanied by Dr. S. Bhattacharya of the Anthropological Survey of India; two grammars (Parji in 1953 and Pengo in 1970) and several papers resulted from these visits. A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (DED) was published in 1961 by Burrow and Emeneau with 4,572 entries. The authors added three supplements to this...