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From: Athel Cornish-Bowden <me@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: John Gumperz died (29-3-2013)
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2024 17:20:28 +0100
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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