[KS] Obituary for Samuel E. Martin

[Robert Ramsey]

[This obituary was originally posted on LinguistList on 17 January.
--Robert Ramsey]


Samuel E. Martin, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Yale University, died
on November 28, 2009, in Vancouver, Washington, at the age of 85.  Martin
received his A.B. with honors in Oriental Languages from the University of
California, Berkeley, in 1947; his M.A. in Oriental Languages from Berkeley
in 1949; and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Yale University in 1950. Like so
many of America¹s Japanologists in the post-war period, Martin had worked as
a Japanese Language Officer during World War II, and after the war, he
studied Chinese linguistics with Yuen Ren Chao at Berkeley, and Japanese
linguistics with Bernard Bloch at Yale.  The dissertation he wrote on
Japanese morphophonemics for his Ph.D. at Yale was judged outstanding enough
to be published as a monograph the following year in the Linguistic Society
of America¹s dissertation series.
 
Martin¹s talent for linguistic analysis had by this time drawn considerable
attention.  In that structuralist era, Yale was considered by many to be the
premier institution in the United States for the study of linguistic
science, and upon completion of his Ph.D. in 1950, Martin joined Yale¹s
illustrious faculty and moved smoothly up the academic ladder, becoming
Professor of Far Eastern Linguistics in 1962.
 
Martin was already recognized internationally as an authority on Korean as
well as on Japanese.  In 1951, he published his seminal article in Language
on Korean phonemics; in 1952, in addition to his dissertation, he published
a monograph on Japanese orthography, a monograph on Japanese speech styles,
and a Korean reader; in 1954 he produced what was then the definitive
monograph on Korean morphophonemics.  It was also during this early period
of his career, when Martin was only 30 years old, that the President of
South Korea, Syngman Rhee, brought Martin to his office for consultation on
orthographic reform.  Korean is a notoriously difficult language to
Romanize, but what is not so well known is that spellings and word divisions
in the Korean alphabet, Hankul, are equally problematic.  Rhee turned to
Martin, an outsider, for help with these complex problems, and Martin¹s
findings and recommendations were published in 1954 in leading Korean
dailies in both Korean and English.
 
Martin also worked extensively on the problems with how languages are
Romanized.  In the same era in which he advised President Rhee on Korean
orthography, Martin devised a Romanization system for Korean, which he
modestly titled ³Yale Romanization².  The approach to writing seen in that
system, as well as in other systems he devised, was based upon simple and
practical principles. First, Yale Romanization maximizes the transparency of
Korean phonological and morphological structure; for example, word spacing
is used liberally to show junctures.  And although Hankul spellings are in
most cases transferred easily into Yale Romanization, Yale transcriptions
reflect a few phonemic distinctions ignored in Hankul.  Martin recommended
that such distinctions be reflected in Hankul spellings as well (that they
were not can be attributed more to political than to linguistic
considerations).  Practicality was equally important to Martin, and in
devising Yale Romanization he made certain that it could be typed on a
QWERTY keyboard without the need for diacritics, something that was not true
of the widely used McCune-Reischauer system.  And so, because of its
structural transparency, and because it is so easily typed, Yale soon became
the Korean Romanization preferred by most linguists in Korea as well as in
the West.  
 
Martin¹s research and publications in this early period were wide-ranging.
In 1953, he published a monograph on the phonemes of Ancient Chinese, and he
followed that work up in 1957 with an article on Mandarin phonology that is
still viewed as a landmark of structuralist methodology. In 1961 he
published the results of an extensive research project on Dagur Mongolian;
the Dagur monograph, which contains a grammatical analysis and a lexicon
together with texts, is still the most comprehensive source of information
about that variety of Mongolian.  Working with native speakers of yet
another language, he found time for a research project on a little-known
variety of Ryukyuan, the findings of which he wrote up in a 40-page article
published in 1970 called ³Shodon: a dialect of the northern Ryukyus².
Martin wrote on Japanese and Korean linguistics of course, but he also wrote
reviews and articles on Semitic, Thai, Uralic, and structuralist theory; he
wrote an encyclopedia article on Japanese literature and a review of Donald
Keene¹s anthology of Japanese literature; he compiled Korean and Japanese
textbooks, readers, and dictionaries; he coauthored a Chinese character
dictionary.  The Manual of Japanese writing, which he co-authored with
Hamako Ito Chaplin, is full of not only good pedagogical sense but also
insightful ideas about juncture, pauses, and pitch accent in modern standard
Japanese. 
 
Some of Martin¹s most influential articles were written in the 1960s.  The
most famous one is undoubtedly his 1966 Language article ³Lexical evidence
relating Korean to Japanese², a work that has formed the basis for
historical comparisons ever since.  The two languages had often been
compared before that, but Martin¹s article represented by far the most
systematic and professional application of the comparative method to Korean
and Japanese.  It changed the suggestion that the two languages are
genetically related into a serious hypothesis.  But there were other gems
that, although less heralded, have been almost equally influential.  For
example, his 1962 article on sound symbolism in Korean explored a rich
avenue of research that has since attracted considerable attention among
phonologists; his 1964 article, ³Speech styles in Japan and Korea², has also
been included in many bibliographies and on many reading lists.  These were
subject matters Martin examined with more professionalism than almost anyone
before him.  
 
Through the ascendant years of transformational grammar, Martin¹s research
deepened.  He had always been concerned more about facts and data than
theory, and as his files and databases grew, he organized his findings and
data into volumes that have had an enduring usefulness.  In those volumes,
he was thoroughly eclectic, taking ideas and analyses from all sources
(including all branches of TG) and using whatever gave the most reasonable
and elegant explanation for the facts.  The facts were often untidy, and
most explanations, however elegant, left loose ends; Martin always included
those exceptions in his narrative so that anyone with a better explanation
would be free to use them.
 
Perhaps Martin¹s greatest work remains his matchless Reference grammar of
Japanese, published by Yale Press in 1975 and more recently reissued by
Hawaii University Press.  In 1977, in his plenary address at the Linguistic
Society of America¹s Summer Institute in Honolulu, Susumu Kuno judged that:
³In another decade, there will only be three works on Japanese grammar from
our time that anyone will remember ... and those are:  Jorden¹s and
Alfonso¹s textbooks, and Martin¹s Reference grammar of Japanese.²  As it
turned out, Kuno¹s prediction was not too far from the mark. Martin¹s book
remains today the best source of information there is about Japanese
grammar, and it does not look like it will be replaced by anything in the
foreseeable future.
 
 The Japanese language through time, published in 1987, represents the
continuation and culmination of this Japanese research.  Most of the volume
consists of etymological lexicons and lists of forms and bibliographic
references indispensable to historical research on the language.
 
Beginning in the 1950s, Martin also maintained extensive files on Korean
grammar and language history.  While completing his grammar of Japanese,
Martin¹s grammar of Korean remained in draft form; by the time A reference
grammar of Korean was ready for publication in 1992, it had been transformed
largely into a historical reference to reflect Martin¹s research of more
recent decades. Some of the same files used for the grammar formed much of
the foundation of his Korean-English dictionary; that dictionary, first
published by Yale Press in 1968, was picked up later by a succession of
Korean publishers.  The dictionary is still a basic reference work,
distinguished by the accuracy and idiomaticity of its English glosses and
translations, and by the inclusion of etymologies for native words when
known. 
 
Sometime in the 1980s, Martin began full-time research on Middle Korean.
This body of alphabetic texts from the 15th and 16th centuries contains some
of the best pre-modern records of any language in the world, but it is also
filled with innumerable linguistic puzzles.  Martin immediately set about
analyzing and cataloging the data in this extensive corpus by reading and
examining the texts one by one.  In addition, however, he now employed
technological tools not available to him in his earlier works.  From his
good friend and colleague the anthropologist Harold Conklin, Martin got his
hands on software for managing and retrieving data and began recording data
in this new format. In the decades that followed, he methodically read
through most of the important Middle Korean texts, screening each passage
for structures and examples to add to his database.
 
The importance and usefulness of the Middle Korean corpus can be seen in his
1992 reference grammar of Korean, especially the 500-page grammatical
lexicon that forms Part 2 of the work.  Each Middle Korean example contained
in the lexicon is transcribed in Romanization with all the phonological
information, including pitches, found in the original text, and it is
translated into idiomatic English.  This kind of information cannot be found
anywhere else.  The Middle Korean database is also the resource upon which
Martin¹s 1996 monograph Consonant lenition in Korean and the Macro-Altaic
question primarily draws its information.  The size of this little volume
(163 pages) belies its importance.  It is not a summary of received wisdom,
nor is it a restatement of his earlier work; in it, Martin offers new
suggestions about earlier Korean.  Moreover, the interested reader should
not skip reading the endnotes; that section is almost as long as the basic
text, and it is just as important.
 
Sam Martin retired from teaching in 1994 and moved to a new home in the
state of Washington, near British Columbia, where his wife Nancy had grown
up.  The new home was even closer to the Portland, Oregon campus where his
daughter Norah teaches philosophy and is now an associate dean. (Son James,
a mechanical engineer at Georgia Tech, lives far away, in Atlanta.)  Freed
from teaching and administrative responsibilities, Martin immersed himself
even more deeply in his research, especially the cataloging of Middle Korean
forms.  In the decade and a half after retirement, Martin formed and
articulated a variety of new ideas, some of which ran counter to received
wisdom, and some were even in conflict with positions he himself had taken
earlier.  What was unfailingly consistent, though, was that no matter what
position he took on any issue, the data, including exceptions, were always
laid out for the reader in their entirety.
 
In 1994, Martin was presented the Presidential Medal of Honor by the
Republic of Korea, and at the ceremony, I was asked to speak on behalf of
his students.  I chose to read something Mr. Martin himself had written in
the introduction to his reference grammar of Korean, which at the time had
just been published:
 
³This book is not trying to prove a theory about the nature of language.  I
do not maintain that the structure of a language is either discoverable or
describable in one and only one ³correct², or even uniquely ³best² way.  The
criteria for judging a description vary with the purpose for which it is
intended.  For a reference grammar the most important criterion is balanced
completeness.  As much useful information as possible must be given in a
form that makes it readily accessible to the user.  The information that is
most often, or most sorely, needed should be the easiest to get at.  Lists
are not to be scorned; formulas are not to be worshipped.  Economy of
statement is a technical criterion relevant to the accessibility of the
information; elegance of statement is a psychological criterion relevant to
the impact of the information.² (p.3)
 
To me, this statement articulates best the philosophy with which Martin
practiced linguistics. The perspective he brought to the discipline, the
emphasis he placed on usefulness, and the distance he maintained from the
pretense of theory‹these are the earmarks of a linguistics more subtle and
lasting than that practiced only in the pursuit of universals. Martin¹s
linguistics is the kind of scholarship appreciated by those who understand
and value the study of language.
 
A reasonably complete bibliography of Martin¹s works can be found on pp.
267-72 of a Festschrift volume, ³In Honor of Samuel E. Martin², of Japanese
Language and Literature, Volume 38, Number 2, October 2004.
 


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