Path: ...!weretis.net!feeder8.news.weretis.net!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Athel Cornish-Bowden Newsgroups: sci.lang Subject: Re: John Gumperz died (29-3-2013) Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2024 17:20:28 +0100 Lines: 41 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net AvAhJqmFFJ8j341dd5Jy6gjvRRQfkYsLuQ+CZOhyxkS7RkV4sT Cancel-Lock: sha1:yMFd5IIKPrtKIPhUe25arR2vFSE= sha256:Ks3Nvz9jxQ1WbhBHx3+oX2rpoYOYBYCO15kWk5dWb6g= User-Agent: Unison/2.2 Bytes: 2230 On 2024-03-30 09:17:30 +0000, Ross Clark said: > Born Germany, 1922. Jewish. Left Germany 1930s, eventually reached the > USA. Here his interests swung from chemistry to linguistics. > PhD, University of Michigan, 1954. Thesis on the dialect of a > Swabian-German community in Michigan. > At University of California, Berkeley, from 1956. > What exactly was his field? > Sociolinguistics? (Crystal), but quite a different tradition from the > Labovian variationists > specifically, Interactional Sociolinguistics? (Crystal) > Ethnography of Communication? (Crystal)...he was a close associate of > Dell Hymes. > I haven't read much of Gumperz. > > Crystal mentions a "famous example", a case arising at Heathrow Airport. > Fortunately I don't have to retell it since it's here, Only to subscribers. > in much the same terms: > > https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/education/john-j-gumperz-linguist-of-cultural-interchange-dies-at-91.html > > > One thing that I have read, and made students read, is the 1971 paper > co-authored with Robert Wilson about the town of Kupwar in Maharashtra, > where close (yet caste-divided) contact between Marathi (Indo-Aryan) > and Kannada (Dravidian) has led to striking convergence of structure, > while vocabularies remain distinct. A classic example of "metatypy" > (though the word hadn't been coined then). > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metatypy > > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._Gumperz -- Athel cb