Dell Hymes, one of the great American linguists, has died at the age of 82.Hymes was one of the great influences on me as I did my field work on Gypsies. He was a linguist, an anthropologist, and never wavered from his devotion to empirical research as the foundation of the study of language, that is to say language in the context culture. In this he differed radically from the speculative, armchair "linguists" of today.
Read Margalit Fox's obit in the New York Times of 11/22/09.
Read the article in Reed Magazine (Hymes was a graduate of Reed) by Rebecca Koffman, Winter 2008.
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