Terrence Kaufman

Not to be confused with Steve Kaufmann.

Terrence Kaufman
Kaufman in 1986
Born	(1937-06-12)June 12, 1937
Died	March 3, 2022(2022-03-03) (aged 84)
Title	Professor Emeritus
Academic background
Alma mater	University of California at Berkeley
Thesis	Grammar of Tzeltal (1963)
Academic advisors	William F. Shipley, Mary Haas
Academic work
Era	21st century
Discipline	Linguistics and anthropology
Sub-discipline	Mesoamerican
Institutions	University of Pittsburgh, University of California at Berkeley

Terrence Kaufman (June 12, 1937 – March 3, 2022) was an American linguist who specialized in lexicography, Mesoamerican historical linguistics, the documentation of unwritten languages, and language contact phenomena. He served as professor emeritus of linguistics and anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Academic career

A drawing of the Tuxtla Statuette, which also used inscriptions from Kaufman's work

Kaufman received his PhD in Linguistics in 1963 from the University of California at Berkeley, with a dissertation on the grammar of the Tzeltal language. After obtaining his PhD, he taught at Ohio State University (1963-1964) and then at UC Berkeley (1964-1970). He later taught at the University of Pittsburgh until his retirement in 2011.

Over the course of his career, Kaufman produced descriptive and comparative historical studies of languages of the Mayan, Siouan, Hokan, Uto-Aztecan, Mixe–Zoquean and Oto-Manguean families. His work on empirical documentation of unwritten languages through fieldwork and training of native linguists gave rise to a rich body of published work as well as a substantial unpublished corpus of notes. Many of his articles were co-authored with other scholars such as Lyle Campbell, Sarah Thomason and John Justeson.

In a 1976 paper co-authored with Lyle Campbell, he advanced a theory that the Olmecs spoke a Mixe–Zoquean language, based on the significant presence of early Mixe–Zoquean loans in many Mesoamerican languages, particularly from specific, culturally significant semantic domains. Along with Lyle Campbell and Thomas Smith-Stark, Kaufman carried out research published in Language (1986) which led to the recognition of Mesoamerica as a linguistic area.

In Language contact, Creolization, and genetic linguistics (1988), Kaufman and Thomason developed a theoretical framework for the understanding of the processes of contact-induced language change.

In 1993, along with John Justeson, Kaufman claimed to have successfully deciphered the Isthmian or Epi-Olmec script. This claim was rejected by anthropologists Michael Coe and Stephen Houston in 2004 after using the decipher key on a recently discovered jade mask. Coe states that the result "turns out to be total nonsense and gobbledygook". In the years prior to his death, Kaufman was involved in the "Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica" or PDLMA, which focused on collecting standardized linguistic data from the under-documented languages of Mesoamerica.

A map showing Kaufman's theory of Mayan Language migration

Early advocate and activist for role of native speakers

In the early 1970s, Kaufman visited Guatemala to conduct linguistic surveys in the Mayan highlands. These surveys eventually led to his proposal for a classification of the Mayan languages. In the process, he stopped at the Proyecto Linguistico Francisco Marroquin (PLFM) in Antigua Guatemala, a Guatemalan NGO intent on becoming a national Mayan-based resource institution.

In collaboration with PLFM staff and inspired in part by Kenneth Hale's 1960s unpublished paper, American Indians in Linguistics, Kaufman was a key participant in the development of the PLFM's plan to train one hundred community-based native speakers of Mayan languages, mostly primary school graduates, to become descriptive linguists for their own languages. He devoted his summers, uncompensated, to lead them through a level of training usually reserved for university students. In this, he was augmented by a dozen professional linguists who were pursuing their PhDs such as Nora England and Judith Maxwell. Each served for several years under the auspices of the Peace Corps to provide year-round follow-up training.

Under Kaufman's leadership, and in consultation with this corps of linguists and Mayan trainees, PLFM developed a proposal for "rational" alphabets for each of the Mayan languages which respected the integrity and unique features of each. The Proposal for alphabets and orthographies for writing the Mayan languages was published in Spanish in January 1976 under Kaufman's name by the Guatemalan Ministry of Education, which supported the proposal. In the polarized environment of 1970s Guatemala, the proposal was not without powerful opponents. With different goals, some insisted on orthographies which imposed Spanish language orthography on the Mayan languages. A corps of PLFM Mayan linguists joined national congresses and debates at the highest level, successfully bringing recognized linguistic expertise to the process. In the 1980s, the Guatemalan National Congress enacted legislation which made the alphabet that Kaufman and the PLFM had proposed (with one minor change) the legal, national alphabet of the country. The Mayan trainees, who had assumed leadership of the PLFM in 1976, had been so engaged in the consideration of Kaufman's published proposal that some later suggested that they should have been co-authors.

Additionally, together with a PLFM linguistic aide, Jo Froman, whom he had trained, Kaufman completed his nation-wide linguistic surveys and a dialect boundary mapping exercise. He then published a proposed classification for the Mayan languages. Translated and edited by Lic. Flavio Rojas Lima of the Seminario de Integración Social, PLFM volunteer Margarita Cruz, PLFM Director Tony Jackson and supported by Ministry of Education language advisor Salvador Aguado Andreut, the proposal was published only in Spanish in 1974 as Idiomas de Mesoamerica ('Languages of Mesoamerica').

Selected bibliography

Articles

• Campbell, Lyle; Kaufman, Terrence (1976). "A Linguistic Look at the Olmec". American Antiquity. 41 (1): 80–89. doi:10.2307/279044. JSTOR 279044. S2CID 162230234.
• Campbell, Lyle; Kaufman, Terrence (1980). "On Mesoamerican linguistics". American Anthropologist. 82 (4): 850–857. doi:10.1525/aa.1980.82.4.02a00120.
• Campbell, Lyle; Kaufman, Terrence; Smith-Stark, Thomas C. (September 1986). "Meso-America as a Linguistic Area". Language. 62 (3): 530–570. doi:10.1353/lan.1986.0105. S2CID 144784988.
• Campbell, Lyle; Kaufman, Terrence (1985). "Mayan Linguistics: Where are we Now?". Annual Review of Anthropology. 14: 187–198. doi:10.1146/annurev.an.14.100185.001155.
• Justeson, John; Kaufman, Terrence (1993). "A decipherment of epi-Olmec hieroglyphic writing". Science. 259 (5102): 1703–1711. Bibcode:1993Sci...259.1703J. doi:10.1126/science.259.5102.1703. PMID 17816888. S2CID 9678265.
• Kaufman, Terrence (June 1976). "Archaeological and Linguistic Correlations in Mayaland and Associated Areas of Meso-America". World Archaeology. 8 (1: Archaeology and Linguistics): 101–118. doi:10.1080/00438243.1976.9979655.
• Kaufman, Terrence (1988). "A Research Program for Reconstructing Proto-Hokan: First Gropings". In DeLancey, Scott (ed.). Papers from the 1988 Hokan–Penutian Languages Workshop. Eugene: University of Oregon. pp. 50–168. OCLC 26917817.
• Kaufman, Terrence (1990). "Language History in South America: What we know and how to know more". In Payne, Doris L. (ed.). Amazonian Linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press. pp. 13–74. ISBN 978-0-292-70414-5.

Books

• Justeson, John; Norman, William; Campbell, Lyle; Kaufman, Terrence (1985). The Foreign Impact on Lowland Mayan Language and Script. Middle American Research Institute Publication. Vol. 53. ISBN 0939238829.
• Kaufman, Terrence (1972). El Proto-Tzeltal-Tzotzil. Fonología comparada y diccionario reconstruido. México: UNAM. ISBN 978-9683666253.
• Thomason, Sarah G.; Kaufman, Terrence (1988). Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07893-4.

References

• Campbell, Lyle (1997). American Indian Languages, The Historical Linguistics of Native America. Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, Oxford University Press.
• Houston, Stephen, and Coe, Michael. 2004. "Has Isthmian Writing Been Deciphered?", Mexicon XXV: 151–161.
• Brigham Young University press release on behalf of Brigham Young University archaeologist Stephen Houston and Yale University professor emeritus Michael Coe disputing Justeson/Kaufman findings.
• Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica Archived March 18, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
• Kaufman's faculty page at the University of Pittsburgh
• Autobiographical notes by Kaufman
• "Works of Terrence Kaufman". Google Scholar.