EDGAR HOWARD STURTEVANT (1875-1952)

Edgar Howard Sturtevant

(1875-1952)

Murray Barnson Emeneau

The externals of the biography of Edgar Howard Sturtevant are the usual academic ones, a succession of degrees earned, teaching posts held, learned societies joined, and fruits of research published. He was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1875, was a student at Illinois College in that city and then at Indiana University (B.A., 1898) and at the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1901). Down to 1920 he held posts in the field of the classics at Indiana University, Maryville (Tennessee) College, the University of Missouri, and Columbia University. The usual societies interested in classical studies were joined. He married Bessie Fitch Skinner in 1903 ; his devoted wife predeceased him in 1949. He is survived by a daughter and two sons, and by four grandchildren.

Prior to 1920 there were the usual publications, concerned with various aspects of classical scholarship. As one would expect from a pupil of Carl Darling Buck’s at Chicago, most of these publications dealt with linguistic matters, the description and history of the Greek and Latin languages. There was much on the pronunciation of these languages, informed by a wide knowledge of phonetics and issuing in The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin (1920), a book which has become the authoritative work on the subject (second, thoroughly revised, edition in 1940). As a part of the general subject of this book Sturtevant thought and published much on the nature of classical verse. If not all questions concerning it were brought as near solution as those treated in the book on pronunciation, much dead wood was cleared away, and perhaps it is now possible through Sturtevant’s work to ask questions about Latin and Greek meter with more hope of answers than previously. Work was published on Greek and Latin morphology, and a Latin text was edited for classroom use (P. Terenti Afri Andria, 1914). In 1917 an important work on Linguistic Change was published and became one of the standard textbooks for students of linguistics. There was also some necessarily speculative, but still firmly grounded, work on the pre-classical languages of the Mediterranean—Lydian, Etruscan, etc.—of minor importance but in some ways prophetic of what was to come later.

From 1920 to 1923 there was an unhappy interlude during which Sturtevant worked as a bank clerk in New York. The winds of the postwar world were not altogether gentle to classical studies, and for a while it seemed as if this scholarly career might fall before them. Happily it was only an interlude, and one which in the long run led to Sturtevant’s becoming, from the age of forty-five on, a much greater figure in teaching and research than he had been before.

He was given an appointment in 1923 at Yale University, at first in Greek and Latin, with special emphasis on the linguistic side of their study—their comparative grammar, the so-called ‘ Italic ‘ dialects of ancient Italy, the non-classical dialects of ancient Greece, work on Plautus’ comedies (two more classroom editions, T. Macci Plauti Mostellaria in 1925, T. Macci Plauti Pseudolus in 1932). He held small classes also in phonetics and other general linguistic subjects for interested students (of whom I was one).

His appointment, along with that of Franklin Edgerton in 1926, marked the beginning of Yale’s rise to a premier position in the field of linguistics. This biography must not concern itself with an account of linguistics at Yale. I must record, however, that Sturtevant’s energy, judgment, and efficiency in both teaching and research were prime factors in this noteworthy rise of an institution to a position in this field such as had not been occupied before in America. It is always interesting to speculate on how an outstanding man ‘ gets that way.’ Sturtevant’s potentialities were undoubtedly released, in part, by the fact that Yale provided him with congenial and happy surroundings, early recognized his bent (he was appointed Associate Professor in Linguistics in 1926, Professor in 1927), and provided him with colleagues whose minds chimed with his.

But there can be no doubt that at least as important a factor in the release of his potentialities was a change of interest. In 1906 a long-dead kingdom and language were discovered by a German excavating expedition at Boghaz-köi in Asia Minor, belonging to those whom we already knew from the Bible as the Hittites. Various factors, including the First World War, delayed study of the language. Decipherment by Hrozny, the Czech Assyriologisi, was reported as early as 1915 and was published in the period 1916 to 1919, but the publication reached this country only at the end of 1919. Hrozny claimed that the Hittite language was one of the Indo-European family to which most of the languages of Europe, as well as the Asiatic Sanskrit and Iranian languages belong. After a short period of skepticism his claim was fully accepted, and the international task began of fitting Hittite into the scheme of Indo-European comparative grammar that had been worked out in the preceding century. It is a subject of engrossing interest for those who are interested in Indo-European comparative grammar, and various factors of chronology and geography combine to make the results, that will eventually be substantiated and accepted, of the utmost importance for Eurasiatic prehistory and early history. This was the work into which Sturtevant threw himself with zest and energy early in his career at Yale. His first publication on the subject was in the Classical Weekly of April 20, 1925 ; his first weighty paper, ‘ On the position of Hittite among the Indo-European languages,’ appeared in Language 2 : 25-34, in March 1926. From then on papers appeared in a steady stream—at times it seemed that sufficient outlets could hardly be found for their publication. Sturtevant himself in 1933 gave references to thirty-six of his articles that dealt with Hittite, and the list was incomplete for the period it covered. Most of this detailed work and much else besides was gathered up and published in a number of important monographs : A Hittite Glossary (1931 ; 2d ed. 1936) ; A Comparative Grammar of the Hittite Language (1933 ; 2d ed. 1951, to be completed by volume 2 on syntax by his devoted pupil and colleague E. Adelaide Hahn) ; A Hittite Chrestomathy (1935 ; with his pupil George Bechtel) ; The Indo-Hittite Laryngeals (1942).

In this work on the Hittite language itself and on its place with relation to Indo-European, Sturtevant was in the forefront of research workers and has made a name for himself that will last long. He learned much from other workers in the field and contributed much. This is not the place to attempt to evaluate how much of his contribution will prove inacceptable and how much will remain firm. I venture to suggest that in the long run, whatever the proportion may be, Sturtevant’s views will continue to be fructifying in other scholars’ work. One point may be mentioned that shows the quality of his work. It had early been noticed that Hittite has features that make it almost imperative to recognize that it was the earliest language to split off from the parent language and go its own way in isolation from it. The German scholar Forrer was first to see this. Sturtevant accepted the view wholeheartedly, attempted to find clinching evidence that could not be controverted by opponents of the view, and found ways to state the issue that would bring it into the open and divest it of the wrappings that tended to obscure it. The issue was dramatized by his invention of the term ‘ Indo-Hittite ‘ for the undivided family, a term that forces scholars to think clearly about one of the most important problems raised in the field of Indo-European studies by the new Hittite material. The term was first used in two publications at about the same time : Language 6 : 25, n. la (March 1930) and Transactions of the American Philological Association 60 : 27 (dated 1929, but appeared in 1930). The revolutionary effect of the Hittite material upon Indo-European studies is also seen in the ‘ laryngeal hypothesis ‘ which Sturtevant’s publications did a great deal to work out both in outlines and in detail.

Even though the latter part of Sturtevant’s research time was largely taken up with the problems just mentioned, he found time for other detailed work in the Indo-European field and also for a thorough rewriting and expansion of his early book Linguistic Change into an Introduction to Linguistic Science (1947).

Much could be said about the efforts of Sturtevant to further the growth of linguistics in America. A few words must suffice. He was one of the most energetic proponents of the foundation of the Linguistic Society of America at the end of 1924 and one of its most ardent members from that time until his death ; he was honored by election as its president in 1931. It was in largest part due to him that various universities in conjunction with the Linguistic Society have held summer teaching Linguistic Institutes at a graduate level since 1928 ; it was his devotion to this child of his, in fact, that led to his unwise attendance at the Linguistic Institute held at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951, and to the aggravation of his heart disease. During the Second World War he was an enthusiastic supporter of the group of younger linguistic scholars who did much of the language training for the Armed Services. To him, in fine, is due in great part that burgeoning of linguistics in this country that has established for it its present high position in world scholarship.

He was not without honor in his own country. Honorary degrees came to him from Illinois College (L.H.D., 1929), Indiana University (LL.D., 1940), the University of Chicago (LL.D., 1941), and Yale University (LL.D., 1951). Besides his presidency of the Linguistic Society of America, he was elected president of the American Oriental Society in 1936. He became a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1939. An issue of the journal of the Linguistic Society, Language, was dedicated to him in 1946.

His fame as a scholar and a devotee of his subject should not eclipse his qualities as a teacher, effective through his gifts of clarity and incisiveness, nor his quality as a liberal by firm conviction in social and political relationships. He will long be remembered by his colleagues at Yale and by his students, both there and at the Linguistic Institutes, for his energy and devotion, his willingness to help with all problems, his dry wit and his unruffled and dignified bearing.

Source : Murray Barnson Emeneau, ‘ Edgar Howard Sturtevant (1875-1952),’ in The American Philosophical Society Yearbook 1952 (Philadelphia, 1953), pp. 339-343. By permission of the American Philosophical Society, and the author.

Edgar Howard Sturtevant

E. Adelaide Hahn

Edgar Howard Sturtevant, the oldest of six children of Alfred Henry and Harriet (Morse) Sturtevant, was born on March 7, 1875, in Jacksonville, Illinois, the seat of Illinois College. He was thoroughly a child of the Middle West, as his speech showed ; on a railroad trip to Chicago in his later years, as he looked at the unbroken circle of the horizon and watched the sun sinking down to it instead of setting behind a hill as in the East, he felt really at home. But his family roots were deep in that New England to which he was ultimately to return.

Much may be learned about his background from the fascinating autobiography of his grandfather, Julian Monson Sturtevant,¹ whose memory he deeply respected, and whose name he gave to his younger son. Julian Sturtevant was born in 1805 in Warren, Connecticut, where, during the Revolution, both his parents also had been born. His great-grandparents, Nehemiah and Fear (Cushman) Sturtevant, had come from Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the Sturtevant family can be traced back to 1642. Fear Cushman was a lineal descendant on the paternal side of Robert Cushman, the agent of the Pilgrims, who procured the Mayflower and the unseaworthy Speed- well, and set sail in the latter, but did not succeed in reaching Plymouth till the following year, in the Fortune ; and on the maternal side of William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth. The illustrious name of Bradford was given to Edgar’s brother (deceased), his grandson, and his great-nephew.

I² have devoted more space to Edgar Sturtevant’s family than he would have done. He always looked forward, not back. Yet in a quiet way he was proud, as he well might be, of the part his forebears had played in the making of New England. There are among the Sturtevants and Sturdevants of today—all of whom he believed to be somehow akin to him—many names well known in scholarly circles ; but in those early days they were all farmers and clergymen, with a sprinkling of army officers when we come down to the Revolution. The academic flavor enters the line with Julian Monson.

When Julian was a boy of ten, the family, financially pressed as a result of the War of 1812, migrated to the Western Reserve, traveling by wagon and on foot—a trip of over 500 miles, which required more than four weeks. In Ohio they experienced the hardships of pioneer life just as had their ancestors of Mayflower days. Julian and his brother read Cicero and Vergil as they tended bees ; and in 1822, with the money their bees had brought them, and a superannuated horse given them by a clergyman, they went back to New England to be trained for the ministry. The institution to which they went was Yale. In later days Edgar Sturtevant liked to point out on the Old Campus, near the statue of Nathan Hale, the site of the dormitory in which his grandfather and great-uncle had roomed.

After receiving his A.B. and while studying at the Theological Seminary, the young Julian became deeply interested in the spread of home missions, and at the age of twenty-three was one of a group of seven—the famous ‘ Yale Band ‘ or ‘ Illinois Band ‘—who signed a document pledging a ‘ Seminary of learning ‘ in Jacksonville, Illinois, then ‘ a village of only two years’ growth from the naked prairie ‘. Again he trekked westward, this time with a young bride, through muddy and wolf-infested wilderness. At Illinois College he taught mathematics, ‘ natural philosophy ‘, and astronomy,³ and, succeeding the Rev. Edward Beecher of the famous Beecher family, in 1844 became its second President.

His grandson was proud that in the quarrels of the day, both theological and political, Julian Sturtevant was regularly on the liberal side. Though a devout Christian and a leader in the evangeli- cal movement, he struggled against narrow denominationalism,⁴ and he deplored the bitter battles between Congregationalists and Presbyterians. He opposed slavery, a stand which took courage and involved danger ; he knew and admired Lincoln,⁵ whose famous ‘ house-divided ‘ speech he heard at Springfield in 1858 ; and in 1863 he went to England, as did Henry Ward Beecher, to present the Northerners’ side in the Civil War.

He must have been a great teacher. He tells with pleasure how the students spontaneously celebrated his election to the presidency by ‘ merrily ‘ ringing the college bell and illuminating the dormitory windows in such a way as to spell his name in light. After his retirement, many old students joined with others to celebrate his eightieth birthday.

The teachers vocation skipped a generation. Julian‘s son Alfred taught mathematics for a while at Illinois College, but turned from this work to farming. Alfred’s son Edgar, however, inherited his grandfather’s talents rather than his father’s ; he disliked the chores that he had to share, and, much as his grandfather had combined Latin with apiculture, he beguiled the weary hours of cow-tending by reciting aloud Sanskrit paradigms in time to the rhythm of milking.⁶

After preparatory study at Whipple Academy, the young Edgar spent two years, from 1893 to 1895, at Illinois College, and, though he did not stay to graduate, he always cherished tender memories of his grandfather’s college. He spoke with special affection and gratitude of his Latin teacher there, Professor Harold W. Johnston ⁷ (of ‘ Private life ‘ fame). When the latter was called from Illinois College to Indiana University, he took his star pupil with him ; and, after being entrusted with Latin classes to teach while still an undergraduate,⁸ Edgar Sturtevant received his A.B. in 1898.⁹

In those days he thought of following in his revered grandfather’s footsteps and becoming a clergyman, for at that time he was a devout believer, though he later turned away from religion. His father, however, wisely counseled him to make sure that he really had a vocation for the church ; and eventually he decided to follow his grandfather as teacher but not as preacher.

He accordingly accepted a fellowship from the University of Chicago, and worked there for his Ph.D. in linguistics, under the father of the science in this country, Carl Darling Buck. Those were golden days for ‘ comparative philology ‘ at Chicago. Young Sturtevant studied happily with Buck and with Hale. Paul Shorey was there teaching literature, but he discouraged his Ph.D. candidates from dipping into linguistics, and by way of protest young Sturtevant spunkily refused to sit in any of Shorey’s classes in Greek and Latin. Probably both were the losers. His dissertation, published in 1902, dealt with contraction of case forms in Latin.¹⁰ Later (1910-13) he published Studies in Greek noun formation (in four parts), an enterprise under Buck’s supervision.

It was during his student days at Chicago that he met Bessie Fitch Skinner, whom he married in 1903.

The six years directly following the acquisition of his Ph.D. in 1901 were the usual Wanderjahre of the young scholar just beginning his career. The first and the last two were spent teaching Latin at Indiana, his alma mater ; the time between was divided between Maryville (Tennessee) College, as Acting Professor of Greek (1902-3), and the University of Missouri, as Acting Assistant Professor of Latin (1903-5). In 1907, when he was still in the early thirties, his career must have seemed at last established, with the appointment to an instructorship in classical philology at Columbia University ; this was followed by a promotion to the assistant professorship in 1913. Those years were financially not easy ; university salaries in the lower ranks were not high, and there were three babies, in rapid succession, to be reared and educated. But his devoted wife was a model of economy and efficiency, and all seemed to be going well. The family bought a house in Edgewater, New Jersey, whence the young teacher commuted to Columbia by the Hudson River ferryboat. I think he always looked back with particular fondness to those days when his children were growing from early childhood into the teens.

But suddenly to those happy years there came a bitter and shattering end. The post-war period was one of uncertainty and enforced economy ; and the Columbia University Department of Classics came to a decision from which it has apparently never since departed—namely, that a specialist in classical linguistics was a luxury (or a frill? or an irrelevancy?) that it could no longer afford. Edgar Sturtevant was dismissed from Columbia in 1920, just as his eldest child was entering college.

For three bleak years he served as clerk in the Irving National Bank. Strangely enough, this was a job for which the scholar was by no means unfit. All his life he was an assiduous follower of the stock market, turning eagerly to the financial pages of the newspaper, and both preaching and practising an unorthodox audacity of investment which, in his case at least, yielded considerable success. But of course his real interests and his real talents lay in a career of scholarship. Tenaciously and courageously he clung to his research ; but it was a sad period.

Ultimately Columbia’s loss was Yale’s gain. In 1923 he was called to Yale as Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin ; in 1926 he became Associate Professor of Linguistics, and a year later Professor. His appointment was followed in rapid succession by that of Franklin Edgerton (1926), Eduard Prokosch (1929), and Edward Sapir (1931). These four men jointly constituted the original editorial board of the William Dwight Whitney linguistic series, and were the leading spirits in the formation of a new group assembled from various departments to constitute the Department of Linguistics, in which Sturtevant became the first Director of Graduate Studies—a post which he held until he retired in 1943, and in which he was succeeded by still another of our greatest linguists, Leonard Bloomfield, who came to Yale in 1940 after the loss of Prokosch and Sapir.¹¹ Through Sturtevant’s instrumentality, Yale also acquired, in 1934, the services of the well-known German Hethitologist and Semitist, Albrecht Goetze ;¹² a lesser man than Sturtevant might have hesitated to introduce a scholar outstanding precisely in his own specialty, but he worked indefatigably to bring this about, and thus placed Yale in the forefront of Hittite studies as well as of linguistic studies in general. The association of these two men proved a source of mutual enrich- ment, to which Goetze pays generous tribute in the preface to his edition of Tunnawi.¹³

In 1943 Sturtevant reached the statutory age of retirement at Yale, but, by an unusual dispensation, was invited to continue giving courses for a short time thereafter. He was loath to cease teaching, and when he received a call to the faculty of another university seriously entertained the idea of accepting ; but he was understandably reluctant to give up his New Haven home and his Yale office, with all their associations. He solved the problem by consenting to hold a Lectureship at Hunter College ; thereafter for seven successive semesters, from September 1944 to January 1948, he came to New York once a week to conduct a graduate course in linguistics or Hittite.

During this period his strength gradually failed. He never compietely recovered from the effects of a severe operation in September 1943 ; many feared that this would terminate his scholarly career, but with indomitable resolution he returned to Hittite before he was able to leave his home. There were ominous signs : a bad spell of dizziness in the fall of 1945, a serious heart attack that necessitated hospitalization in the spring of 1948. His wife’s death in 1949 was a heavy blow. Yet he undauntedly kept on with his work ; the revised edition of his Hittite grammar appeared in 1951, just in time for the Hittite course that he was scheduled to give in the Linguistic Institute at the University of California. We were to have set out for Berkeley together on June 14, but that morning he telephoned, ‘ Bad news ! The doctor won’t let me come. He says I must wait at least ten days.’ Twelve days later he insisted on setting out ; he came by air, reaching Berkeley on June 27. In the evening of June 28, he delivered a public lecture, on the prehistory of Indo-European, and received an ovation ; and the next day he taught his Hittite class (which I had been taking care of for him) for the first time. He met them just four times. At about 2 a.m. on Monday, July 9, he almost died of a frighteningly violent heart attack ; he was given oxygen and taken to the local hospital, where he remained till the end of the Institute. He was then able to make the homeward trip by train with his daughter, summoned from the East, and me ; but the year that followed was one of constantly increasing weakness and suffering, so that when his death came, on July 1, 1952, it could be viewed only as a release.

The list of his books is inspiring. In addition to the two already mentioned from his Chicago days, there were two others of his early period, Linguistic change (1917, reissued in 1942) and The pronunciation of Greek and Latin (1920). These were superseded by two outstanding later works : the latter by its second edition (1940), a completely new book recognized as the definitive work on the subject ; and the former by An introduction to linguistic science ¹⁴(1947), stemming from the course that he had taught so often at Yale, Hunter, and various Linguistic Institutes, but which he would never give again once his notes had appeared in book form.

He also edited three Latin plays : Terence’s Andria (1914), and Plautus’s Mostellaria (1925) and Pseudolus (1932), the last-named with the collaboration of three members of his graduate course in Roman comedy. Though in general he disapproved of dedications as sentimental, and of the use of Latin by moderns as artificial, the Andria bears a dedication to the memory of his old teacher Johnston, quo magistro Musam Terentianam amare coepi.¹⁵ His editions, though they perhaps overestimate the college freshman’s ability to handle the Latin text without much help from the notes, show his characteristic common sense : thus he employs ‘ the characters U and v in the manner usual in editions of later writers ‘ (Andria, preface),¹⁶ omits the customary analysis of the plot ‘ so as not to lessen the students’ interest in the play itself ‘ (ib.), and tries to arrange the notes to save ‘ useless turning of leaves ‘ (Pseudolus, preface).

His greatest works were unquestionably those in the field of Hittite, all published in the William Dwight Whitney linguistic series : A comparative grammar of the Hittite language ¹⁷ (1933) ; A Hittite chrestomathy, with George Bechtel (1935) ; A Hittite glossary, second edition¹⁸ (1936) ; and, much later, the revised edition of the Comparative grammar (1951).¹⁹ Stemming from his Hittite studies is his more controversial work The Indo-Hittite laryngeals (1942).

His published articles are legion. Nearly all the earliest ones dealt with questions of the Greek or Latin language, for the most part having to do specifically with one or two allied subjects : the pronunciation of Greek and Latin, especially the latter ; and the reading of Latin verse. These articles are to be found passim in classical periodicals of both the United States and England, mainly the American journal of philology, Classical philology, and the Transactions of the American Philological Association.

Through these works he had already won recognition in the field of scholarship, so that at the semicentennial celebration of the APA in 1919, as recorded in Vol. 50 of the Transactions, he was awarded a place in both the two great summaries of American scholarship, Paul Shorey’s ‘ Fifty years of classical studies in America and Maurice Bloomfield’s ‘ Fifty years of comparative philology in America ‘.²⁰ The studies in pronunciation culminated in tne two editions 0f his work on the subject. Those on prosody, in which he was particularly interested in studying the question of clash vs. harmony of word accent and verse ictus in the Latin dactylic hexameter, were intended to constitute the beginning of a treatment of metrics which he planned to make his lifework.

But his interest shifted as soon as it was demonstrated beyond doubt that the newly deciphered Hittite language was connected with Indo-European—or, as people thought at first, that it was itself Indo-European. For a while, as he told me not long ago, he was uncertain whether he should cling to the old problem or turn to the new ; fortunately he decided in favor of what was surely to prove the wider and more fruitful field of study. He marked the new interest in 1924 by joining the American Oriental Society, which he was later (1936-7) to serve as president. In 1925 he published what I think was his first article on Hittite (Classical Weekly 18. 171-5), in which he suggested (173) that Hittite ‘ is to be thought of as a sister language to the parent speech of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, etc.’ Beginning with this year, he published articles on Hittite in many periodicals, both American and foreign, above all in Language. Of the really unparalleled series in this journal, a word must be said.

Beginning with the third number of Language, for September 1925, and ending with the most recent number (as this is written), for April-June 1952, Language contained from his pen fifty articles (two written jointly with George L. Trager), a note under the head of Miscellanea, the Proceedings of the 1927 meeting (for which he served as Acting Secretary), an obituary notice of Eva Fiesel, and twenty-six reviews of thirty-six books. Particularly noteworthy were the seven years 1926-1932, when 21 of the 28 numbers each contained an article by him ; during this period there were two separate calendar years, 1928 and 1931, and also one span of two years without a break, June 1927 to March 1931, when he had an article in every single number. The five years following these seven fat years must not be thought of as lean ones. It was during this quinquennium, 1933-37, that the great trilogy of Grammar, Chrestomathy, and Glossary appeared.

With the exception of an article in 1926 (his third in Language) dealing with medieval rhythmic verse, and of two articles in 1934 and 1939, dealing specifically with Latin (the later one a return to his old love, pronunciation), all these articles, even one on Osean in 1935, in some way concern Hittite, its relations to the Indo-European languages, and the light it casts on the reconstruction of Indo- European and of Indo-Hittite. Both his first article and his last, published posthumously, deal with the position of Hittite with respect to other Anatolian languages. The progress made in knowledge of this group is marked by the difference between the two. In the first he is able simply to suggest that Hittite and Lydian ‘ are elder sisters of the previously known Indo-European languages ‘, and that it ‘ seems very likely ’ that Lydian is ‘ akin with Carian, Lycian, etc.’ (Lg. 1.75). In the second he can declare categorically that ‘ the five Anatolian languages that we know best are all closely related ’ (Lg. 28.180) and can give specific proof of the kinship of Hittite with Luwian, Lycian, and Lydian. Part of the evidence deals with laryngeals, of whose existence he was utterly unaware in the earlier article. But his words here (28.177), that Hittite is ‘ only a cousin ‘ of the Indo-European languages, echo what he had already said, in 1926, in his second article in Language²¹ (2.32). It was there (33) that he had offered as ‘ the family name ‘ Pre-Indo-European. But in 1930 (Lg. 6.25 fn. la) he wrote that Pre-Indo-European is ‘ needed in another sense ‘, and proposed as a substitute Indo-Hittite, here I think used for the first time.

The dream of eventually reconstructing Indo-Hittite was doubtless already in his mind. In 1929, in his review (Lg. 5.261-2) of Delaporte’s just-published Éléments de la grammaire hittite, he had written (261) : י The new grammar is severely descriptive, and that is altogether proper at the present stage of our knowledge. Many details of phonology and morphology must be investigated before a comparative grammar can be written.’ His long series of articles constitute precisely this investigation of phonology and morphology.

Sometimes, naturally, he made mistakes that had to be corrected later. As a result he was severely criticized, especially by the cautious German scholars, for publishing prematurely. Yet it seems to me, in view of his completely honest readiness to admit and retract his errors once they were detected, either by himself or by others, he was showing a certain courage, and was doing scholarship no disservice ; on the contrary, by following a trail wherever it seemed to lead, and then unhesitatingly retracing his steps when he found he had made a wrong turning, he saved others from subsequently going astray in the same way. A typical instance is an article in 1927 (Lg. 3.109-22), in which he erroneously (as he later realized and reported) tried to demonstrate that Hittite initial h corresponds to Indo-European bh. Incidentally, in this same article there was one nugget of pure gold : his significant suggestion (121) ‘ that in several cases Hittite medial h represents an original sound which has been lost in Indo-European ‘ .This was the basis of a theory as yet undreamed of with relation to Hittite—an old and discredited theory published by Saussure nearly half a century earlier which was now to be revived : the laryngeal hypothesis.

Interest in laryngeals began again in that very year, 1927, with the work of Kurylowicz, who later came to Yale to study with Sturtevant ; but above all it was his colleague Sapir who kindled Sturtevant’s ardent zeal for the subject. It must have been during the thirties, probably in the first part of the decade, that he wrote me in great excitement of a meeting of the Yale Linguistic Club when Sapir presented his views on laryngeals, and showed how they cleared up a number of cruces—twenty-six of them, I think—in Indo-European comparative grammar. Sturtevant went on where these men began, dealing with laryngeals in many of his articles, and finally publishing his systematic treatment of them in book form in 1942.

No account of Sturtevant would be complete without stress on what the Linguistic Society did for him and what he did for the Linguistic Society. A member of the organizing committee with Bloomfield and Boiling, and a Signer of the Call, he was, at the opening meeting in December 1924, named chairman of a committee of five to draft a constitution ; and when that constitution came to be revised fourteen years later, he again served as committee chairman. He was a Member of the Executive Committee in 1925 and again in 1926, Vice-President in 1927, President in 1931. In 1927, when the LSA was elected to membership in the American Council of Learned Societies, he and Bloomfield were named delegates ; he continued in this capacity for four four-year terms in succession, from 1927 to 1942, and again from 1944 to 1948, even though, with his customary generosity, he repeatedly tried to cede his place to some younger man. On the Standing Committee on Research, established in 1934, he served as chairman until his resignation in 1939. In 1944 he was named chairman of the Committee on the Collitz Bequest. These, and many other positions of responsibility, he occupied with his characteristic courtesy, common sense, and fairness. But it was above all as father of the Linguistic Institute that he made history in the Linguistic Society and in the larger world of scholarship.

Always eager to give honor where it was due, he declared more than once that the distinction of originally suggesting something on the order of a Linguistic Institute belonged to Reinhold Saleski. But it was he more than any one else who brought the Institute into being and gave it the form it has held ever since : a meeting of minds where young scholars and old, tyros and veterans, mingle on equal terms in classes and conferences, the same man often a teacher in one class and a student in another, for a memorable period of some six or eight weeks under the joint auspices of the LSA and the college or university serving as host. Often it has provided the impetus for other projects of moment : thus the linguistic atlas, an undertaking in which Sturtevant always took the liveliest interest, had its genesis in the Institute of 1931.

In 1927 Sturtevant invited correspondence concerning a Linguistic Institute to be held at Yale in 1928 (Lg. 3.275),²² and the Society voted approval of a program ‘ along the lines proposed by R. E. Saleski and E. H. Sturtevant ‘ (Lg. 4.60). A group of sixty-five responded. The experiment was repeated at Yale in 1923 ; in 1930 and 1931 the Institute met at City College in New York. During these four sessions Sturtevant served as Director.

But conditions of financing the Institute in those early days were precarious and inadequate, and for five years it was suspended. Its creator never lost hope. He even ventured to predict that some day rival institutions would bid against one another for the privilege of holding the Institute, and he lived to see his prophecy fulfilled, in 1949 when there were two claimants for the honor, and in 1951 when there were three. In December 1951, he learned with satisfaction of the Executive Committee’s decision that after 1953 there might be more than one Linguistic Institute in a given summer.

To return to the early days. The Institute was finally re-established at Michigan, where it was to spend so many flourishing terms, from 1936 to 1940 and again from 1945 to 1950, with an interlude of two summers each at North Carolina and at Wisconsin. During almost all these sessions, 1936 through 1947, he served on the Administrative Committee as Associate Director, a position which he held again in connection with his last Institute, the one at California in 1951. Of these twenty Institutes, he taught at all but seven ; and during these seven, he was present at all but one (that of 1949) for part of the time, for the purpose of lecturing or attending the LSA summer meeting or both. In 1948 at Michigan he served as the first holder of the Collitz Professorship.

He was also a zealous attendant at meetings of the Linguistic Society. Of all the December meetings, beginning with the organization meeting in 1924, and of all the summer meetings, from the first one in 1938, the only ones at which he failed to be present were the summer meeting of 1949, when he did not make the trip to Ann Arbor, and the two in 1951, when he was too ill to attend. Furthermore, beginning with the first annual meeting in 1925, he presented a paper ²³ at every one that he attended, except the summer meeting of 1950 ; and even at the two sad meetings of 1951, a paper of his was listed by title. His absence cast a shadow over these meetings, from both of which affectionate messages were officially sent to him ; and still more over the summer meeting of 1952 at Indiana, where resolutions were voted in memory of the two members who had done so much for the Society and who had died within four days of each other, Roland G. Kent²⁴ and Edgar H. Sturtevant.

Recognition of a happy kind was accorded to him by the Society in 1946, when the editor of Language dedicated to him the April-June number, containing articles and reviews by a carefully selected group of those who had been closest to him as his colleagues, his students, or both. This gave him much pleasure.

He was not only a great scholar ; he was also (the two often go together, but not always) a great teacher. In this respect he grew and developed. I can testify that the course in comparative grammar of Greek and Latin that I took with him at Columbia in 1915-6, when I was just out of college, was thoroughly sound and scholarly, and that I enjoyed it ; but I think in those days he was wary of letting his students know just how human he was.²⁵ That early course was not, like the later ones that I attended, at Linguistic Institutes and at Hunter, enlivened with unexpected touches of dry, wry humor, all the more delightful for being delivered with apparent solemnity, or illuminated by real flashes of genuine psychological or philosophical insight. Perhaps his greatest triumph in teaching was his conduct of the introductory course at various Institutes ; what he says in his obituary of Bloomfield concerning the ‘ extraordinary success’ of the course as Bloomfield gave it, applies equally to him.²⁶

While at Columbia, he taught undergraduates as well as graduates, and in later years he spoke with affection and pride of the eventual achievements in different fields of some of them. Quite late in his Yale days, as an experiment to convince his doubting classical colleagues that it was worth while to teach beginning Latin even in college, he conducted an elementary class for Yale undergraduates ; I visited it and was much impressed by the boys’ accurate pronunciation of Latin and their excellent control of the language in handling the text. Of the students who worked for their Ph.D. under his guidance, probably he was most gratified by the prowess in classics of Ralph Ward, who succeeded him at Yale, and in Hittite of George Bechtel, who collaborated with him in his Chrestomathy. But I suppose that the Ph.D. under his direction which afforded him the most joy (though he was said to have been more nervous at her oral examination than the candidate) was that won in 1931 by his daughter Grace. He did not hold with traditional ceremonies and academic trappings, and he consistently stayed away from Yale commencements ; but he did attend the one in 1931 when two of his children received the doctorate, Julian in chemistry and Grace in linguistics. One other Yale commencement also was destined to bring him great happiness : that of twenty years later, when once more two Sturtevants, he and his brother, received doctoral degrees, this time honoris causa.

Every institution with which he was intimately connected awarded him an honorary degree. Illinois College, which had celebrated its semicentennial in 1879 with an address from his grandfather, gave him the L.H.D. at its centennial in 1929. To his A.B. from Indiana he added the LL.D. in 1940 ; and to his Ph.D. from Chicago, another LL.D. in 1941, when the university celebrated its semicentennial. But the climax came in 1951, at Yale’s 250th anniversary, with the unprecedented singling out of two brothers as pre-eminent each in his field, Edgar Sturtevant in linguistics and his younger brother Alfred in genetics. At the ceremony Edgar Sturtevant shared with John Dewey the most enthusiastic demonstration from the audience.

The connection with Yale begun with his illustrious grandfather is well maintained among Sturtevants of today. When his daughter Grace in 1928 married Francis W. Hopkins, Yale A.B. and Ph.D. (now Professor of Economics at the New Jersey College for Women), two noted Yale families were united, for Frank’s father was Edward Washburn Hopkins, Edgerton’s predecessor at Yale as Professor at Sanskrit. Edgar’s son, Julian M. Sturtevant, is a distinguished member of the Yale Department of Chemistry ; his nephew William, Alfred’s son, is a brilliant graduate student in anthropology ; and his grandson Bradford, Julian’s son, is a sophomore in Yale College.

He is survived by a sister and three brothers, a daughter and two sons, two grandsons and two granddaughters, and countless friends.

Source : E. Adelaide Hahn, ‘ Edgar Howard Sturtevant,’ Language 28.417-434 (1952). By permission of Language, and the author.

¹ Julian M. Sturtevant, An autobiography, ed. by J. M. Sturtevant Jr. (published by the Fleming H. Reveil Company, publishers of evangelical literature). The work was written by Sturtevant during the last year of his life, 1885-6, when he was eighty years old; but was not published till 1896.

² If apologies are needed, I tender them for my failure to use the conventional third person. Edgar Sturtevant was himself so sincere and straightforward that any artificiality in the writing of this memoir seems to me out of place.

³ Of course he was a classicist too. In particular he knew Vergil so well that if he heard any two consecutive lines of this author quoted, he could instantly locate them.

⁴ Cf. his Autobiography (237) : ' We never sought for Illinois College any ecclesiastical control, and would never have submitted to it. We always desired to place it in the hands of patriotic, religious men, that it might be managed not for a sect in the Church or a party in the State, but to qualify young men for the intelligent and efficient service of God both in the Church and the State.' Those were strong words for his time.

⁵ He indignantly repudiated (293-5) the statement by Herndon that Lincoln was an ' unbeliever,' and declared that Herndon ' had no correct discernment of the real line that separates the Christian from the infidel.'

⁶ He had performed the extraordinary task of teaching himself Sanskrit. In those days he was particularly interested in both the language and the culture of India, and a prize-winning ‘ declamation ‘ on the occasion of his graduation from prep school dealt with some phase of Hindu philosophy. However, he maintained that he won the prize only because a violent thunder-storm broke out during the exercises, and he was the only contestant with the wits to yell loudly enough to make the judges hear him. (As a boy, he must have had more penetrating vocal powers than he manifested later.)

⁷ Another Latin teacher whom he remembered with particular admiration was Mrs. Charles H. Beeson.

⁸ Despite this financial aid, those were not easy days financially. I think it was at this time that he eked out his income by driving about the countryside during vacation selling stereopticon slides. As typical of his tribulations, he would tell with gusto of being attacked by a farmer’s dog ; the dog’s owner gave him a good order for slides, but when he made a special trip to deliver them, the farmer declined to make payment, explaining, ‘ We didn’t want the slides ; we only gave you the order because we were sorry for you when the dog tore your trousers.’

⁹ When the University was granted a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, thirteen years later, he was one of the graduates at once elected to alumni membership. Another honor, which of course came later (1939), was election to the American Philosophical Society.

¹⁰ For precise details as to his various publications, see the .. . bibliography by Bernard Bloch [appended to this article as originally published in Language].

¹¹ These two men fulfilled their duties in advising students in quite different ways. In their obituaries of Bloomfield, both Bloch (Lg. 25.91) and Sturtevant himself (Year book of the American Philosophical Society 1949.304) refer to Bloomfield's custom of counseling would-be students of linguistics against entering the field, because of the difficulty of mzking a living by this means. Sturtevant in contrast to such defeatism encouraged those with the necessary intellectual endowment to make the venture ; in this connection he often quoted his great predecessor, William Dwight Whitney, to the effect that anyone in control of his specialization would find a place to use it.

¹² Many of the distinguished foreign linguists by whom American scholarship has been enriched through Hitler's malevolence, were helped to find posts in this country largely through Sturtevant's efforts.

¹³ The Hittite ritual of Tunnawi, interpreted by Albrecht Goetze in cooperation with E. H. Sturtevant ; New Haven, 1938.

¹⁴ In this work he voices two theses that were particular favorites of his, though they have not been universally accepted : that ' language must have been invented for the purpose of lying' (48), and that lapses may be of great importance in bringing about linguistic change (38-9).

¹⁵ Terence was the author he cared most for among the Romans ; Homer and Herodotus, among the Greeks. As every one must, he preferred Greek literature to Latin ; and he maintained that teachers of classics erred sorely when, forced by the attacks of educationists to abandon one of their precious languages, they elected to try to salvage Latin and threw Greek to the wolves.

¹⁶ His next comment strikes a responsive chord in every teacher's heart : ' meaningless variation between editions in such matters is very misleading to students ; as witness the young woman who had noticed no feature of Tacitus' style except his avoidance of capital letters.'

¹⁷ An important feature of this work was his neat proof (73-83) that in Hittite original voiceless stops tend to be written double while original voiced stops are always written single ; this formulation has sometimes been spoken of as ‘ Sturtevant’s law.’ An interesting confirmation of his observation was later furnished by Speiser’s demonstration (Lg. 16.319-40) of a similar state of affairs in Hurrian writing, on which Hittite writing may have been based (see HG² 3 and 26).

¹⁸ The first edition had been a much less ambitious work published by the LSA as Language monograph No. 9 (1931). There was also a small Supplement to the second edition (1939).

¹⁹ I wish to take the opportunity to point out that this work, though it bears both our names, is wholly his ; I deeply regret that neither the title page nor the preface makes this explicit. The book is Vol. 1 of what we planned as a twovolume work, he to be responsible for the first volume, and I for the second, which is to deal with syntax (a subject treated very scantily in his original Comparative grammar, and not at all in his revised edition).

²⁰ Shorey (50.49) named the book Linguistic change in an enumeration of outstanding American examples of Altertumswissenschaft. Bloomfield (50.82) included Sturtevant in a list of fourteen names of American scholars distinguished in ‘ comparative philology,’ i.e. linguistics. Readers of Language may be interested in the entire list : the other thirteen are Boiling, Buck, Collitz, Conant, Edgerton, Fay, Hempl, Jackson, Kent, Oertel, Petersen, Wheeler, Wood. (A different compiler would undoubtedly have added two Bloomfields.)

²¹ On the position of Hittite among the Indo-European languages, Lg. 2.25-34 (1926).

²² The program there announced has been adhered to ever since: ‘. . . a large variety of linguistic courses will be offered, to be conducted by scholars distinguished in their fields. These courses will be intended for advanced graduate students and for high school and college teachers who feel the need of a better understanding of the history of the languages in which they are interested ; and also for advanced scholars who may wish to familiarize themselves with remoter parts of the linguistic territory. The Institute will be of advantage also to scholars who wish merely the opportunity of working during the summer at a large library, along with the privilege of association and discussion of problems with other scholars in the same field.’

²³ His papers, whether read or (as they were more frequently) talked, were always admirably presented and crystal clear, alike to those familiar and to those unfamiliar with the language or the problem that he discussed. It was a cardinal principle with him that all matters concerning language should be of interest to all students of language, and he dreaded the thought that the Society might split up into sections like the Modem Language Association. For this reason he gravely deplored the growing unintelligibility, to him and to others, of the technical papers presented by some of the younger descriptivists.

²⁴ A full obituary of Kent, by George S. Lane, will appear in the first number of Language for 1953. It will be accompanied by a complete bibliography of Kent's published writings.

²⁵ He was very human indeed. He liked social gatherings. He liked his friends to drop in at his office and sit smoking and chatting with him, for which purpose he always kept on hand a liberal supply of cigarettes, though he cared little for smoking himself. In particular, on the day following a meeting of the Yale Linguistic Club, his office was always a rendezvous for little groups eagerly continuing the discussions of the previous evening. He enjoyed other sources of entertainment too : he liked pretty girls (and they liked him), and he liked burlesque shows. Concerning the latter, he loved to quote the late Justice Holmes, ‘ Thank God I’m a man of low tastes.’

²⁶ Compare the comments on his course by the Directors of the Institute at North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Michigan (Bulletin 15.18, 17.13, 20.12).