Dear colleagues, I’m saddened to report the death, at the age of 98, of Eric Hamp, world-renowned historical linguist who specialized as an Indo-Europeanist and who made contributions to the study of Slavic and Celtic as well as of many smaller Indo-European branches such as Albanian, many of these based on his own dialect field work. He added to our knowledge of the Balkan Sprachbund. He was also a scholar of American Indian languages and an editor of the International Journal of American Linguistics. He did field work on Quileute and Ojibwa. He studied linguistic aspects of braille.
Eric was born in London on November 26, 1920. He entered Amherst College at the age of 16, earned his BA in 1942, served in the US Army, and then did his graduate work at Harvard, studying with Joshua Whatmough and Kenneth H. Jackson. He came to the University of Chicago in 1950 and devoted his entire academic career to this community until he retired in 1991 as the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Linguistics. He chaired the Department from 1966 to 1969. He held appointments also in the departments of Psychology and Slavic Languages and Literatures, along with the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World. He served as director for the Center for Balkan and Slavic Studies from 1965 to 1991. He was a prodigious lecturer. He was honored by no less than six Festschriften. He belonged to many academies and learned societies. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. A postage stamp was minted in his honor in Albania in 2012 to honor his 92nd birthday. He published more than 3500 articles.
He was here at the University when I arrived in 1967, a major figure in the intellectual life of the Humanities Division. One had to be impressed with the stories that circulated about the number of languages he acquired: was it thirty-nine in all, or some figure in the forties? ‘Twas said of him that in three to five weeks he could master a new language well enough to be able to navigate in it. Amiable and collegial to a remarkable degree, he could converse about linguistic matters with just about anyone at the drop of a hat. He was a major presence in the Renaissance Seminar and the Chicago Linguistics Society, and was often seen at the faculty round table at lunchtime in the Quadrangle Club. He moved away from Hyde Park in his retirement. He will be much missed.
-David Bevington, Secretary of Faculty Emeriti and co-chair of the Emeriti Steering Committee
Read more about Professor Hamp via the Chicago Tribune.