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Terrence Kaufman
Summary
Terrence Kaufman (1937 – March 3, 2022) was an American linguist specializing in documentation of unwritten languages, lexicography, Mesoamerican historical linguistics and language contact phenomena. He was an emeritus professor of linguistics and anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh.
Kaufman received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963 with his thesis on the grammar of Tzeltal. Post-PhD, he taught at The Ohio State University (1963-1964) and at UC Berkeley (1964-1970) prior to taking up the position at the University of Pittsburgh that he held 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through fieldwork and training of native linguists gave rise to a rich body of published work as well as a substantial unpublished corpus of notes.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 substantial 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), co-authored by Kaufman and Sarah Thomason, the authors developed a theoretical framework for the understanding of the processes of contact-induced language change.
Along with John Justeson, in 1993 he claimed to have successfully deciphered the Isthmian or Epi-Olmec script. This claim has been rejected by anthropologists Michael Coe and Stephen Houston in 2004 after using the decipher key on a recently discovered jade mask.
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