Autobiographical Sketch

My father worked as a financial officer in the Housing Department of Leeds Corporation, in an office in the British equivalent of City Hall, which made him a kind of civil servant. I suspect his professional life was a dull routine, but fortunately in his spare time he was an avid reader. One of my joys as a boy was to sit wedged tightly with him in the same easy chair while he read aloud to me. What he and I read together were naturally adventure stories for boys, like Treasure Island and Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, but my father himself read very widely, being particularly fond of the novels of H. G. Wells and Henry James and works of philosophy and theology. In his library were the dialogues of Plato and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in Alexander Pope's verse translations. Clearly, he would like to have had an academic career, but from being a teenager he had been forced to work for a living to help support his family. My subsequent interest in going to the university and becoming an academic was undoubtedly stimulated by his strong intellectual interests and his frustrated ambitions.

Before the age of ten, while still in grade school, I developed a keen interest in astronomy. This may have resulted from perusing the multi-volume encyclopedia that my parents bought chiefly for my benefit. It was entitled Newnes's Pictorial Knowledge, and I recall that it had a section on astronomy that included pictures of planets in the solar system, of fixed stars and galaxies. This seems to have fired my imagination. Also, my paternal grandfather gave me a hand-held telescope that he had used in the country years before when he was employed as a gamekeeper, and that telescope enabled me to stargaze. During the war, Leeds, like many of the cities in England, was subjected to air-raids by the Luftwaffe, and I remember darting out into the garden with my telescope to see if I could spot anything interesting in the sky, a German bomber perhaps! But most of the time the raiding planes would merely drop coloured flares to illuminate the area. Needless to say, my parents did not approve of these antics of mine! At the same time, they encouraged my interest in astronomy and bought me more books on the subject, and I remember at some point deciding that when I grew up I would study astronomy and perhaps become the Astronomer Royal and be in charge of the Greenwich Observatory!

The Percivals, my father's family, had come to Leeds from rural Wensleydale in the North Riding of Yorkshire (now known as North Yorksire). My father was born in 1896 in the hamlet of Thornton Rust, a few miles west of the village of Aysgarth, famous for a set of three spectacular waterfalls. The family moved to Leeds when my father was nine years old. I imagine that the reason my grandfather decided to move to the big city was the size of his family. My father had five brothers and three sisters. As a result of this migration, he had all his life an almost obsessive nostalgia for what he affectionately called "the Dale" and would go there whenever possible and stay for a few days in his native village or as near to it as possible.

My mother rather disapproved of this, but she used to go along with it. Her family, the Rycrofts, were natives of Leeds. Like my father she had many siblings, being the eldest of ten children. When I was a child, there seemed to be an endless series of weddings taking place, and I still have photographs taken at a number of them. To make things more complicated, both my parents had many uncles and aunts, who would show up on such occasions. When my father's parents celebrated their golden wedding in 1942, for instance, a group of my grandmother's relatives turned up and were photographed. However, I cannot identify most of them, in spite of the fact that I now have a family tree to refer to. I should explain that both my father's grandfathers had two families. My paternal grandmother's family was especially numerous, and I remember hearing some interesting stories about their exploits. My grandmother's father was fond of the ladies, and his second wife came from a relatively affluent family and was thought to have married beneath her station. We are talking about the Victorian period, of course.

One of my grandmother's sisters (a half-sister as a matter of fact), for instance, lived not too far away in a place called Belle Isle. Her name was Elizabeth, an all-too common name in the Percival and Prest families, so she was always referred to as "Auntie Belle Isle." As a child I did not know what her real name was. I have a vivid memory of her standing in the living room of my paternal grandparents' house and saying, apropos of a cataract operation that she had just undergone, "And you have to keep your spine still, Dearie!" She must have been repeating an instruction given her immediately after the operation.

My mother's father, Granddad Rycroft, was an irascible fellow who at times quarrelled noisily with my grandmother in rich Yorkshire dialect. His hobby was cultivating roses, and to this day when I catch the scent of a particularly aromatic rose it reminds me of his garden. His roses must have been of the non-hybrid variety. He treated his grandchildren brusquely (in that respect he was perhaps the archetypical Yorkshireman!), but I liked him nevertheless. Perhaps that was because he really liked me although he seldom showed his feelings. His way of discouraging us small fry from, say, straying too near the open fire was to bark out: "Go on! Fall in!" If I took down a book to read, and there was a complete set of Arthur Mee's magnificent ten-volume Children's Encyclopedia there, I had to put back the volume that I had been reading before taking another, or Granddad would shout: "First, tha mun side t'other 'an!" ("First, you must put away the other one!"). When you ate at the Rycrofts' table the rule was that "children should be seen and not heard," as the saying was in those days. At the close of the afternoon meal, as a child you were trained to say: "Thank you for a good tea! May I leave the table?" Nothing as formal as that took place at home or at the house of my paternal grandparents.

I went to the local elementary school presided over by a rather domineering headmistress, a short dumpy woman called Miss Dixon. If you had to leave the school premises on an errand she would call after you "Mind you don't knock a bus down!" I enjoyed school and did well. However, I think I must have been rather proud of myself and perhaps a little pretentious at times, because on one occasion the headmistress herself reprimanded me saying: "You think you're the Cock-o'-the North, don't you?"

Just before the outbreak of the war with Germany in the first week of September 1939, my school was evacuated to Pool-in-Wharfedale, a village about eight miles northwest of Leeds. (The move rook place on September 1, and Britain declared war on September 3.) I was quartered with the Rodhams, fellow Methodists, who had a son John who was my age. John and I slept in the same bed, and we always did a lot of talking before finally falling off to sleep. It was a new experience having a brother, and I enjoyed it. We walked to school together, although we went to different schools. This was because my school maintained its separate identity by being quartered in the school room of the local Methodist church. In fact, the children in my entire school were taught in one large room, something resembling the "one-room school house" so common in the United States of America. We indulged in a number of unusual activities. For example, we were taught both sword dancing and Morris dancing. Our teacher in sword dancing was an irascible male teacher called Mr Lemmon, who also taught us singing. I remember we learned Schubert's "The Erl King." Another new, and I think salutary experience was that all of us, even the boys, were taught to knit. I knit myself a pair of gloves. Yet another interesting experience we had was studying meteorology (cyclones and anticyclones, etc.), so we were trained to take daily readings of temperature and wind direction. Living now in the country rather than the city we went on many excursions on foot together to collect frogspawn and other interesting things of that kind. We also learned how to read maps: geography was emphasized in those days. I think that all in all going to school in the country as an evacuee was a positive experience for us.

I returned home to Leeds from Pool in the spring of 1940, and in 1941 I earned a scholarship that enabled me to attend Leeds Boys Modern School, which was a semi-private high school in Lawnswood, a rather upper middle-class suburb of Leeds about two miles from where we lived. My main academic interest at this point shifted from astronomy to modern languages. We started French in the second form, when I was eleven, and German in the third, when I was twelve. My father encouraged me in my French studies, having studied the language when he was in high school himself thirty years earlier. In fact, acutely conscious that he had forgotten much of his French he attempted to brush up his knowledge from time to time. So I think I can say that I owe him my interest in learning languages. In about 1944, he bought me a copy of The Loom of Language: A Guide to Foreign Languages for the Home Student by Frederick Bodmer, which had just come out. I found Bodmer's book fascinating and was soon so interested in languages (I had already made a good start with French and German!) that I got the bizarre idea of inventing languages of my own. All these invented languages were provided with different grammars, and I arranged them in a family tree, modelled on the family tree of the Indo-European languages that I found in a copy of Webster's unabridged English Dictionary. One day one of my masters caught me reading (in class!) a notebook containing texts in my favourite artificial language, called Amtosh, and confiscated it. I understand that the masters then held a conference, as a result of which the German master, Mr Fritschi, volunteered to teach me Latin one-on-one. He was an excellent pedagogue, and I did so well at Latin with him that I was soon more proficient in it than the boys who were taking the language from the regular Latin teacher, Mr Andrews, who had an M.A. from Oxford but by this time had become rather an uninspiring teacher. Mr Fritschi also insisted on teaching me Greek, which I especially enjoyed. In fact, I found Homer's Odyssey more fun to read in Greek than Ovid's Metamorphoses in Latin! To beef up my Latin I took a correspondence course in that language, which enabled me to do well on the Latin examination that I took as part of what was called in those days the "Higher School Certificate."

I did my undergraduate work in the German department at Leeds University from 1948 to 1951, specializing in what was termed in those days "philology," which comprised the older periods of the German language (Middle and Old High German), Gothic, and Old English. We were introduced to such mysteries as Proto-Germanic, not to speak of Indo-European, which at that time was still called "Indo-Germanic" (German Indogermanisch). The head of the department was Alexander Gillies, who specialized in the writings of Herder. He taught a three-year sequence of courses on German literature, which was slanted towards the history of ideas. He was a doctor of philosophy, which was what I imagined accounted for the fact that he knew so much about the history of philosophy! (This was the first time that I had ever heard of Leibniz, for instance.) Even his lectures on Goethe's Faust (he was particularly interested in the Urfaust, the earliest extant version of Faust!) were presented from the point of view of what was called in those days Geistesgeschichte, roughly equivalent to intellectual history. Gillies could identify Herder's influence in almost every line of Faust. At Leeds University I also took a course in general and English phonetics in a recently founded department of phonetics headed by Peter McCarthy. McCarthy's lectures fascinated me in more than one way. He spoke the most perfect RP (Received Pronunciation) that I had ever heard, and he was thoroughly proficient in the special kind of precise ear training that Daniel Jones had developed at London University. He had studied at the London School of Oriental and African Languages. For a while I even dreamed of becoming a phonetician myself.

In 1950, as part of the requirements for the bachelor's degree in the German department, I spent a semester at a German university. I elected to go to Tübingen University in the south of Germany, where I took courses in German language and literature and even began learning Swedish. I should mention at this point, however, that that was not my first exposure to life on the Continent: in 1948 I had spent a week with a group of high school students in the charming seaside resort of Étretat on the coast of Normandy, and in the summer of 1949 I had attended a summer school on French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, which I followed up by spending a month at Palavas, a resort on the south coast of France near Montpellier, where I taught English to two young boys in a family. As regards Swedish, I had first studied the language at Leeds University, but not in the German department: the Russian professor, Rolf Shaftlin, offered a Swedish course outside his normal duties. He was a Russian Jew who had originally come from Riga and later lived for some time in Sweden, where he learned to speak the language fluently. I remember being especially impressed with his linguistic skills: he was married to a Norwegian woman and had also learned to speak that language fluently. It seemed almost incredible to me that anybody could effortlessly speak two such closely related languages as Norwegian and Swedish and not get them confused when he switched back and forth. I am sure Shafltin was also familiar with Latvian. In this way, I was beginning at that time to broaden my linguistic background deliberately, and I pictured myself as collecting languages, as it were. I was also an enthusiastic member of Leeds's "Polyglot Society," which met regularly in the centre of the city for members to practise speaking French, German, Russian, and Italian. I attended the French and German sessions, and my school friend Neville Bancroft the French and the Russian sessions. In this way, I met interesting French expatriates, including the rather flamboyant Mme Gilliat, who was at that time the French consular agent in Leeds.

After obtaining my bachelor's degree in 1951, I first went for an academic year to Uppsala University with a fellowship from the Swedish Institute for Cultural Relations. At Uppsala I took courses in Swedish and all the other Scandinavian languages, including Old Icelandic. It was there that I began studying Russian. That happened because along with several colleagues, likewise scholarship-recipients of the Swedish Institute, I had become bored with Scandinavian philology, so in the middle of the academic year we all decided to sign up for Russian. In the Russian classes that we took all the students were foreigners, i.e. non-Swedes, so it was a bizarre experience for us all to learn to translate from Russian to Swedish and vice versa. We even studied Russian classical writers, such as Tolstoy and Lermontov.

On midsummer night in 1952, I took the ferry from Stockholm over to Finland with a girl friend who had invited me to stay with her family. I ended up working in the Nordiska Föreningsbanken ['Nordic Union Bank'] at a temporary branch set up in the Olympic Village. This was the year in which the summer Olympic Games were held in Helsinki. The bank I worked for gave us all seats in the stadium for one day, so I saw Czech long-distance runner Emil Zátopek win the Marathon. After the games were over I continued to work at the bank's head-office in downtown Helsinki until January 1953. Rental accommodations were hard to come by in Helsinki at that time, and the economy was only just beginning to revive after the deprivations of the recent war. (On the other hand, Sweden, the country I had just come from, had been neutral in World War II and had escaped unscathed; because of its relative prosperity it was often referred to at that time as "the paradise of Europe!").

I rented a room not far from the centre of the city in the apartment of a lady whose husband was away for a year in America on business. This was again a cosmopolitan milieu, and I sat in on Finnish classes at Helsinki University and had an English friend who had lived in Argentina and taught Spanish. I attended the Franco-Finnish Club and acted in a production of the medieval "Farce du cuvier." The bank that I was working at valued me for my knowledge of languages. I could handle customers who spoke English, French, German, or Swedish. Moreover, Helsinki is a bilingual city, and my bank catered to Swedish speakers. The personnel manager, a formidable character called Erik Heinrichs, had previously been aide-de-camp to Marshal Mannerheim, the commander in chief of the Finnish army in the war against the Soviet Union. While interviewing me for my job in the bank Heinrichs at one point quizzically asked me whether I was perhaps a poet! I read the daily newspaper in Swedish and communicated with my colleagues in the bank in Swedish or any other language that we happened to have in common. For a while I worked in the English correspondence department headed by a charming expatriot Englishman called Mr Norman. I continued to study Russian: we had Russian-speaking colleagues in the bank. There were many expatriot Russians living in Helsinki, and I knew quite a few and practised my Russian with them. Soviet newspapers and films were readily available. Daily trains still ran from Helsinki to Leningrad. I could listen in to Soviet radio broadcasts from Leningrad or Tallinn. However, I never got the chance to travel to Russia while I lived in Helsinki. (Stalin was still alive!)

In mid-January 1953, I decided to leave Finland in order to avoid having to pay Finnish income tax, which at that time was so high that it would have significantly lowered my standard of living. I travelled to Spain in part on the famous Scandinavian Express that runs from Stockholm to Paris. I had been persuaded to seek employmment in Spain by the Spanish consul in Helsinki, to whom I was referred by the Uruguayan consul. At that time, I had the bizarre idea of emigrating to Uruguay. The attraction of Uruguay was that it is in the southern hemisphere, and I imagined that it would not be affected by a Third World War, which I assumed was imminent! The Uruguayan consul, aware that I did not speak Spanish, thought that I would have little chance of employment there and recommended that I first talk to the Spanish consul with a view to travelling to Spain and acquiring a knowledge of Spanish. A friend had introducted me to the head of the Berlitz School in Stockholm, and she put me in touch with her counterpart in Valencia.

As a result of these investigations, I ended up teaching English at the Berlitz School in Barcelona. After working there for a few months, however, I was summarily fired for giving private lessons to Berlitz students, which was against the rules. As is well known, the Berlitz schools use the direct method of teaching languages, which is not very effective, so one tended to have dissatisfied students, some of whom would beg you to give them private lessons using a different method. For a while I went regularly to an automotive garage to give lessons to a group of ex-Berlitz students. I also understudied for an English friend who taught in a local high school. That gave me an insight into Spanish education. In the process, I willy-nilly immersed myself in Spanish. At the same time, I am not sure how much English my students learned from me! During the summer of 1953, I was hired to give English and German lessons to two boys by a wealthy family of Norwegian descent who used to spend the summer at Palamós, a resort on the Costa Brava. I lived in their spartanic country villa. I returned to England in September 1953, after having been away from England for two entire years, and was (as I expected) conscripted into the British Army on December 10th of that year.

After basic training at Aldershot I was transferred to the Intelligence Corps depot in Maresfield to take a course in what the Army called Field Security, which was essentially military counter-intelligence, i.e. not the glamorous cloak-and-dagger activity people familiar with the novels of John Le Carré associate with the term intelligence. At the end of my training I was sent to the so-called "Interallied Tactical Study Group" which was housed in a magnificent luxury hotel (the Palasthotel) in Bad Neuenahr in an area called the Eifel, in the French Zone of German. It was under the command of a French general (le Général Le Puloch, a fiery Breton!). My job was to translate French military documents into English. I shared an office with two French non-commissioned officers who translated English military documents into French, and we enjoyed each other's company immensely. Much of the time we had little to do. Periodically, the officers would leave on manoeuvres and when they returned write reports in their respective languages that we translators had to translate so that the study group could submit bilingual English-French documents to higher authority. Officially, we were on detachment from the headquarters of Allied Land Forces Central Europe (ALFCE) in Fontainebleau, and our unit was hush-hush. In fact, to this day I have been unable to find any reference to our Groupe d'études tactiques interalliées on the Web. Perhaps it is still top secret, and I may be committing a breach of national (even international!) security by even referring to its existence! I've always thought that it would be interesting to get in touch with some of the people I worked with every day, such as the general's charming young aide-de-camp Lieutenant Orsini, a young Corsican subaltern about my own age.

On the ground floor of the Palast Hotel the officers had had a three-dimensional model constucted that simulated the terrain on either side of the border between East and West Germany. Their tactical study concerned ways of dealing with a possible Soviet invasion of the German Federal Republic. All of us, officers and men, ate in a special mess set up for the so-called Ressortissants français in the Ahrweiler area, and although the kitchen personnel were Germans the cuisine was impeccably French and quite outstanding. We British non-commissioned officers were on detachment from the British Army of the Rhine (the BAOR) in northern Germany, and we lacked the comforts of a British Army mess, so it was assumed that we were underprivileged! Therefore, the Army included in our pay a daily allowance to be spent on such things as ham and eggs for breakfast (to supplement the meagre continental breakfast of rolls and coffee). We could also use the same allowance to order snails (escargots à la bourguignonne) for dinner on occasion! At lunch and dinner, a quarter of a litre of wine or a bottle of mineral water (Apollinariswasser) was regarded as a normal accompaniment and was free of charge. The menu was in French, and meals could be elaborate affairs. What impressed me was the fact that that all my British colleagues relished the food despite the fact that it did not resemble the fare that they had been accustomed to at home in civilian life.

Just once we translators were included in a manoeuvre in France, at a place near Soissons in France. That was an interesting experience in that one got to see high-level officers of the various NATO armies at work. I recall briefly meeting an American general, and I marvelled at how different he seemed from the average British and French general. For one thing he wore ordinary fatigues like the rest of us, but his most salient characteristic was that he behaved with complete informality. He was actually easy to talk to! This gave me a glimpse of American mores that must have stuck in my mind.

At that time I had already begun planning to go to Yale after demobilization to study linguistics and knew that one of the departmental entrance requirements was a reading knowledge of Latin and Greek. I accordingly spent much of my abundant spare time while in the office in Bad Neuenahr brushing up my high-school Latin and Greek. One day, our major came in and saw what I was doing. "Good God, reading Greek!" he exclaimed incredulously. At least, he recognized which language I was reading! I was demobilized from the British Army on 8 December 1955 after completing my two years of compulsory military service.

I was to do my graduate work in the Linguistics department at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut from 1956 to 1960. My decision to go to the United States to study linguistics had matured gradually. In November 1952 the Swedish-language newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet 'Capital Times,' which I read regularly while I was in Helsinki, published a laudatory account of recent American linguistics in an article cryptically entitled "The Sociology of Language and Object Rules" by a Swedish-speaking Finn called Arne Runeberg. What Runeberg focused on was the work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, and he claimed that the ideas of these two American linguists could throw light on the question of why verbs govern a variety of cases in Finnish, above all the partitive and the genitive, rather than the accusative case, as in the familiar Indo-European languages. This article captivated me so much that I cut it out and saved it. In the following year, while I was living in Barcelona, I one day met a young American tourist in the boarding house where I was staying, and he told me that I would find studying in the USA immensely rewarding. These encouraging remarks were important because that was an idea that had never occurred to me before.

Later, during my years of military service I had ample time to reflect on what I wanted to do with my life after demobilization. I remember once mentioning in passing to the British commanding officer in our unit in Bad Neuenahr that I was considering going to the United States to study, and he immediately said he thought that that was a bad idea. Who knows, that emphatically negative reaction from a military man may have acted as positive encouragement! For I cannot say that I was an enthusiastic soldier. I resented army discipline and the general lack of freedom. Looking back on it now, however, I suspect that military life nevertheless did me some good. It was a beneficial experience to meet people I would never have met in civilian life. Moreover, working as a translator gave me more facility in writing than I had ever had before. I remember that the papers that I had handed in as an undergraduate were not considered especially well-written. Later as a graduate student at Yale I discovered somewhat to my surprise that my professors regarded my papers as well written.

After leaving the Army in December 1955, I returned home to Leeds, read up on linguistics departments in the USA in the university library there, applied to the Yale University Linguistics department and was accepted. Between leaving the army and sailing for New York (on the Queen Mary) in September 1956, I took various odd jobs in Leeds (including one at the Ministry of Labour and National Service!), in order to earn enough money to pay for the voyage to the New World. Yale awarded me a fellowship, but it did not include a travel subvention, which looking back on it now I realize was fortunate, because a travel grant would most probably have included a proviso that I return to my native land after completing course work in the United States. In fact, one prestigious fellowship that I applied for in 1956 did include such a stipulation, and though I didn't think so at the time, it was fortunate that I was not awarded it!

At Yale, I lived in the Hall of Graduate Studies, which like all the residential houses at Yale was built in the 1930s to resemble an Oxford or Cambridge college, complete with a courtyard and refectory. Since the Linguistics department was also housed in the same building, going to class was simply a matter of walking along corridors. In winter time, this was especially convenient, because New England winters are unpleasantly raw. The head of the Linguistics department at that time was Bernard Bloch, who was the editor of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. I was required to take his introductory course, which was an unforgettable and formative experience. Bloch's method was as follows. Students had to hand in every two weeks a two-page paper with one and a half-inch margins on all sides that reflected their reading, but did not merely mechanically summarize what they had been reading. The length limit was not negotiable. Bloch said that he would simply not read a third page, and warned us that late papers would not be accepted. The pressure that this routine created was almost palpable. Bloch's comments on students' papers were also legendary. I especially remember a caustic comment that he once wrote in red ink in the margin of the second (and hence last!) page of one of my papers (halfway down the page, in fact): "Your paper really begins here." What embarrassed me was that I realized that he was perfectly right! In general, I always found Bloch to be fundamentally honest intellectually and deep down sympathetic to students, in spite of his somewhat brusque exterior.

Bloch also taught two regular courses entitled "Phonemics" and "Grammatical Theory," which we were all required to take. The majority of the other courses we took were in Indo-European linguistics. I myself was surprised at this since I had not gone to Yale to study historical linguistics, but this emphasis on Indo-European was a consequence of the fact that at that time linguistics was still taught in conjunction with Indic languages. In particular, we were required to take two years of Sanskrit, a language I would never have dreamed before that I would study. At the beginning of the course of study in Linguistics we were also required to have a reading knowledge of French and German and, as I've mentioned, to pass reading exams in Latin and Greek.

Professors at Yale other than Bernard Bloch from whom I took courses were Warren Cowgill (Gothic and Comparative Greek and Latin), Isidore Dyen (Austronesian, Comparative Method), Floyd Lounsbury (Kinship Analysis, Language and Culture), Samuel Martin (Phonetics, Comparative Linguistics), Paul Tedesco (Sanskrit and Old Church Slavic), Paul Thieme (Sanskrit), and Rulon S. Wells (Semantics and Contemporary European Trends). I spent the summer of 1957 at the Linguistic Institute held at the University of Michigan, where I took courses from Martin Joos (Advanced Phonemics), Isidore Dyen (Comparative Austronesian), Norman McQuown (Classical Nahuatl), and Jerzy Kuryłowicz (Apophony in Indo-European).

I completed my course work at Yale in three years and in the fourth began work on my doctoral dissertation, a grammar of Toba Batak, an important Austronesian language spoken in northern Sumatra. I was working under the direction of Isidore Dyen, who proved to be a difficult advisor. Due to political unrest in Sumatra at that time I was advised not to travel to Indonesia to do fieldwork. I therefore based my grammar on the speech of several native informants living in New Haven who were enrolled as students at Yale University. I also consulted earlier grammatical descriptions of the language done by Dutch and German missionaries and administrators. The most complete grammar of Toba Batak was the work of the legendary Hermanus Neubronner van der Tuuk, who spent years in the Batak-speaking area in the middle of the nineteenth century. To this day, however, I regret never having had the opportunity to travel to Sumatra.

Towards the end of the 1950s I decided to settle permanently in the United States. I had originally come to Yale with the intention of spending one year there earning an M.A., after which I planned to return to Britain. But I discovered to my surprise that Yale did not regard the M.A. degree as important, and I immediately enrolled in the doctoral programme, which was intended to last at least four years. I earned an M.A. in 1959 and then went on to do my informant work on Toba Batak preparatory to writing my dissertation. In 1960, I looked for a job in the United States and found that jobs for linguists that year were plentiful. I accordingly left New Haven to take up a staff position in the Mechanical Translation group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There I worked mainly on a computerized grammar of German in the Research Laboratory of Electronics under the direction of Victor Yngve, who was head of that group at the time. I was fortunate in the fact that Yngve allowed us to audit courses in the Institute, some of which were taught by him and others by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, members of the soon to be created MIT Linguistics department. One might say, therefore, that I got four more years of valuable graduate training at the expense of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and the National Science Foundation, who financed our research. I particularly enjoyed auditing Chomsky's courses on symbolic logic and analytical philosophy. In the latter course, he critiqued Bertrand Russell's An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Wittgenstein's Blue and Brown Books, and Quine's Word and Object, which had just appeared. These were the early days of Chomsky's dispute with the psychologist B. F. Skinner and his followers and sympathizers. A colleague and I read Leibniz's Discourse on Metaphysics together. Without fear of being accused of exaggeration I can say that my four years at MIT changed my entire intellectual orientation.

While I was at MIT, in addition to my duties in the Mechanical Translation project, I taught courses on Scientific German and French for the Modern Languages Department. I also once taught a semester-long introductory course on German for undergraduates. In 1962-1963, I was lent out to Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. to teach a single year-long introductory course on linguistics for their Anthropology department. This was the first time that I had ever taught linguistics, and it was an interesting experience. Half of my students were anthropology graduate students and the other half undergraduates from a variety of departments. Somewhat to my surprise, the young undergraduates tended to do better than the older graduate students, a fact that embarrassed the chairman of my department. During that year the department underwent an unexpected upheaval. In the autumn of 1962, one of the members of the department gave a public address critical of President Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis and for that was reprimanded by the president of Brandeis University. She promptly resigned, and several other members of the department resigned in sympathy, which at one stroke halved the membership of the department. At the end of that academic year, my contract with Brandeis was not renewed because the department felt that I was an expensive luxury, as they put it.

In my last year at MIT (1964), I handed in and defended my dissertation at Yale, was awarded my degree, and was then hired as the chairman of a new Linguistics department being set up at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I stayed in Milwaukee five years and enjoyed living in that city immensely. At that time the Milwaukee campus of the University of Wisconsin was undergoing expansion, and I found that I had a number of stimulating young colleagues. It was also possible to go regularly to the main campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and meet the linguists there. In addition, Milwaukee is within easy reach of Chicago, and I enjoyed taking the train to that city to attend meetings of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Altogether my years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee were extremely rewarding.

In September 1967, I met Alice Irene Iverson at the International Congress of Linguists that we were both attending in Bucharest, Romania. She had come to Bucharest with Roman Jakobson, whose editorial assistant she had been at Harvard University. She and I discovered that we had moved in the same circles in Cambridge but had never met until this chance encounter. Alice visited me in Milwaukee in spring 1968, and we decided to marry. We were married in Milwaukee on 18 May 1968 and attended the Linguistic Institute at the University of Illinois that summer together.

We had a happy marriage, which ended forty-three years later on June 30, 2011, when Alice died after a short illness. I feel I cannot adequately express my profound love and admiration for her.

In the autumn of 1969, Alice and I moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where I was hired by the Linguistics department at the University of Kansas. I taught there for twenty-six years, retiring from teaching in 1995.

From about 1970, my main research interest was focused on the grammatical activity of Italian Renaissance humanists. I focused on their Latin grammars, but also at times looked at their work on other languages, such as Greek, Hebrew, and the vernacular languages of Europe. It so happened that the department of special collections in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas had a large collection of primary sources of interest to me: grammars and dictionaries dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth century. In this way, a remarkable thing happened: almost entirely by chance, I ended up teaching at a university where the library had material uniquely suited to the kind of research that I most enjoyed doing. I tell people who ask me why the University of Kansas acquired such an incomparable collection of rare books that three factors were involved: avid book collectors in the library, an enlightened chancellor, and plenty of money available at a time when rare printed books could be still bought at reasonable prices with US dollars.

I can identify three people who stimulated my interest in Renaissance grammatical work. The first was Noam Chomsky, whose lectures on the history of linguistics I attended at MIT in the early 1960s. On arriving at the University of Kansas, I received a grant from the General Research Fund, which enabled me to spend the summer of 1970 at the Bodleian Library at Oxford. My aim was to look into the antecedents of the general and universal grammar movement that began in the seventeenth century. At Oxford University, moreover, I met a person who gave me the philological tools to work on late medieval and early Renaissance grammatical activity, namely Dr R. W. Hunt, a world expert on medieval and Renaissance grammar. At that time Dr Hunt had the resounding title of "Keeper of Western Manuscripts." It was he who encouraged me to read manuscripts and stimulated my interest in the grammatical writings of Guarino Veronese (1374-1460). The Bodleian Library has perhaps the largest collection in the world of manuscripts and early printed editions of Guarino's various grammatical works. In the academic year 1970-1971, I then met Sesto Prete, a professor in the KU Classics department. Prete was a palaeographer, a classical philologist trained in Germany, and a student of Renaissance humanism. These three people: Chomsky, Hunt, and Prete exercised a profound influence on my coming of age as a scholar.

In the 1970s, Alice and I travelled in the summers to many European cities to enable me to consult grammatical manuscripts. I covered above all the Italian libraries, both public and ecclesiastical, which have rich collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. We had many fascinating experiences in this process. We usually arrived in a city by train without announcing our arrival beforehand at the local libraries, and I had the job of finding my way to the libraries and negotiating with the librarians. At one library, namely the Biblioteca Guarnacci in Volterra, I inquired after the director and was told that he was in a mental institution. I was then asked "Would you like to speak to him by phone?" I naturally said yes and was immediately connected to him by telephone. He seemed perfectly sane to me, and when he asked me if I would like him to come over so that I could see the collection I assented. In fact, he appeared quite soon after, let Alice and me into the reading room, and kept an eye on us while I read a manuscript of the Regulae grammaticales of Guarino Veronese. After a short while, he asked us whether we would like to go into the adjoining museum of Etruscan antiquities to see their collection of grave urns. We jumped at the opportunity, needless to say. The urns bore lifelike bas-reliefs of the deceased, and I vividly recall that when we finally left the museum and found ourselves walking the streets of that picturesque Tuscan hill town it seemed to us that despite the passage of more than two thousand years today's inhabitants looked remarkably like the people portrayed in those bas-reliefs!

My serious publication career began with a 44-page chapter on Renaissance linguistics contributed to a volume in the series Current Trends in Linguistics (1975), edited by Thomas A. Sebeok. Subsequently, I presented a series of papers on Renaissance linguistics at meetings of the International Congress of Humanistic Studies, founded by Sesto Prete, which convene annually in Sassoferrato, Italy. Since 1995, I was engaged on a critical edition of the Rudimenta grammatices by Niccolò Perotti (1429-1480). I regularly attend meetings of the International Conference on the History of Linguistics (ICHoLS), which convene in a different country every three years. In 1997, I was elected president of the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences (NAAHoLS), and I attend their annual meetings whenever I can.

In 1991 I was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and with Alice and her mother and elder sister attended the initiation ceremony held in the academy's headquarters near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass.

In the mid-seventies, I decided to re-work my doctoral dissertation and completely re-wrote it one summer. The resulting manuscript was submitted to Stephen Wurm at the Australian National University in Canberra. It accordingly appeared as A Grammar of the Urbanised Toba-Batak of Medan, Pacific Linguistics, Series B, No. 76, Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies (Canberra: The Australian National University, 1981). The reference in the title, suggested by Professor Wurm, to the fact that the variety of Toba-Batak I had described was spoken in the city of Medan seemed to me to be particularly appropriate.

It may seem odd that my regular teaching load at the University of Kansas should have included courses in Sanskrit. I had studied that language when I was a graduate student at Yale (a two-year sequence of Sanskrit courses was in fact a requirement in the Yale linguistics department in those days, a requirement which most of us students found rather irksome). But the training we acquired was thorough and painstaking. Professor Tedesco was especially demanding as an instructor. A decade or so later, after I arrived at the University of Kansas, a colleague from the Classics department who had for some time been teaching the Sanskrit sequence for our department decided to back out. At that point I was persuaded to take up the challenge, as it were. As it turned out, I found teaching Sanskrit an extremely interesting experience. The majority of students who enrolled in the courses were from departments other than linguistics and were therefore relatively uninterested in the Indo-European aspects of the language that had previously been the focus of attention. I re-trained myself in more modern methods of teaching Sanskrit than the ones that had been in vogue when I was a graduate student at Yale. In this process I learned a great deal, but I never did any scholarly work in Indology. This is an example of the fact that in academia one can end up teaching things outside one's original province. At an institution like the University of Kansas, this kind of golden opportunity may present itself more easily than, say, at an Ivy-League university.

After retiring in 1995, I began to split my time between Lawrence and Seattle. Generally, I spend seven weeks in Lawrence twice a year. While in Lawrence I work on my critical edition of the Rudimenta grammatices of Niccolò Perotti and for that purpose spend time in my study in the Spencer Library at the University of Kansas.

A PDF version of my edition went on line in 2010, so from then on it has been available to all scholars in the world interested in the works of Perotti and/or the development of grammatical writing at the hands of the Renaissance humanists. The next stage of my plan will be to produce an XML version of the same work to enable the interested scholar to scan all sections of the work, either individually or globally.