¹ Julian M. Sturtevant, An autobiography, ed. by J. M. Sturtevant Jr. (published by the Fleming H. Revell Company, publishers of evangelical literature). The work was written by Sturtevant during the last year of his life, 1885–6, when he was eighty years old; but was not published till 1896.

² If apologies are needed, I tender them for my failure to use the conventional third person. Edgar Sturtevant was himself so sincere and straightforward that any artificiality in the writing of this memoir seems to me out of place.

³ Of course he was a classicist too. In particular he knew Vergil so well that if he heard any two consecutive lines of this author quoted, he could instantly locate them.

⁴ Cf. his Autobiography (237): ‘We never sought for Illinois College any ecclesiastical control, and would never have submitted to it. We always desired to place it in the hands of patriotic, religious men, that it might be managed not for a sect in the Church or a party in the State, but to qualify young men for the intelligent and efficient service of God both in the Church and the State.‘ Those were strong words for his time.

⁵ He indignantly repudiated (293–5) the statement by Herndon that Lincoln was an ‘unbeliever’, and declared that Herndon ‘had no correct discernment of the real line that separates the Christian from the infidel’.

⁶ He had performed the extraordinary task of teaching himself Sanskrit. In those days he was particularly interested in both the language and the culture of India, and a prize-winning ‘declamation’ on the occasion of his graduation from prep school dealt with some phase of Hindu philosophy. However, he maintained that he won the prize only because a violent thunder-storm broke out during the exercises, and he was the only contestant with the wits to yell loudly enough to make the judges hear him. (As a boy, he must have had more penetrating vocal powers than he manifested later.)

⁷ Another Latin teacher whom he remembered with particular admiration was Mrs. Charles H. Beeson.

⁸ Despite this financial aid, those were not easy days financially. I think it was at this time that he eked out his income by driving about the countryside during vacation selling stereopticon slides. As typical of his tribulations, he would tell with gusto of being attacked by a farmer's dog; the dog's owner gave him a good order for slides, but when he made a special trip to deliver them, the farmer declined to make payment, explaining, ‘We didn't want the slides; we only gave you the order because we were sorry for you when the dog tore your trousers.‘

⁹ When the University was granted a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, thirteen years later, he was one of the graduates at once elected to alumni membership. Another honor, which of course came later (1939), was election to the American Philosophical Society.

¹⁰ For precise details as to his various publications, see the appended bibliography by Bernard Bloch.

¹¹ These two men fulfilled their duties in advising students in quite different ways. In their obituaries of Bloomfield, both Bloch (Lg. 25.91) and Sturtevant himself (Year book of the American Philosophical Society 1949.304) refer to Bloomfield's custom of counseling would-be students of linguistics against entering the field, because of the difficulty of making a living by this means. Sturtevant in contrast to such defeatism encouraged those with the necessary intellectual endowment to make the venture; in this connection he often quoted his great predecessor, William Dwight Whitney, to the effect that anyone in control of his specialization would find a place to use it.

¹² Many of the distinguished foreign linguists by whom American scholarship has been enriched through Hitler's malevolence, were helped to find posts in this country largely through Sturtevant's efforts.

¹³ The Hittite ritual of Tunnawi, interpreted by Albrecht Goetze in cooperation with E. H. Sturtevant; New Haven, 1938.

¹⁴ In this work he voices two theses that were particular favorites of his, though they have not been universally accepted: that ‘language must have been invented for the purpose of lying’ (48), and that lapses may be of great importance in bringing about linguistic change (38–9).

¹⁵ Terence was the author he cared most for among the Romans; Homer and Herodotus, among the Greeks. As every one must, he preferred Greek literature to Latin; and he maintained that teachers of classics erred sorely when, forced by the attacks of educationists to abandon one of their precious languages, they elected to try to salvage Latin and threw Greek to the wolves.

¹⁶ His next comment strikes a responsive chord in every teacher's heart: ‘meaningless variation between editions in such matters is very misleading to students; as witness the young woman who had noticed no feature of Tacitus’ style except his avoidance of capital letters.'

¹⁷ An important feature of this work was his neat proof (73–83) that in Hittite original voiceless stops tend to be written double while original voiced stops are always written single; this formulation has sometimes been spoken of as ‘Sturtevant's law’. An interesting confirmation of his observation was later furnished by Speiser's demonstration (Lg. 16.319–40) of a similar state of affairs in Hurrian writing, on which Hittite writing may have been based (see HG² 3 and 26).

¹⁸ The first edition had been a much less ambitious work published by the LSA as Language monograph No. 9 (1931). There was also a small Supplement to the second edition (1939).

¹⁹ I wish to take the opportunity to point out that this work, though it bears both our names, is wholly his; I deeply regret that neither the title page nor the preface makes this explicit. The book is Vol. 1 of what we planned as a two-volume work, he to be responsible for the first volume, and I for the second, which is to deal with syntax (a subject treated very scantily in his original Comparative grammar, and not at all in his revised edition).

²⁰ Shorey (50.49) named the book Linguistic change in an enumeration of outstanding American examples of Altertumswissenschaft. Bloomfield (50.82) included Sturtevant in a list of fourteen names of American scholars distinguished in ‘comparative philology’, i.e. linguistics. Readers of Language may be interested in the entire list: the other thirteen are Bolling, Buck, Collitz, Conant, Edgerton, Fay, Hempl, Jackson, Kent, Oertel, Petersen, Wheeler, Wood. (A different compiler would undoubtedly have added two Bloomfields.)

²¹ On the position of Hittite among the Indo-European languages, Lg. 2.25–34 (1926).

²² The program there announced has been adhered to ever since: ‘...a large variety of linguistic courses will be offered, to be conducted by scholars distinguished in their fields. These courses will be intended for advanced graduate students and for high school and college teachers who feel the need of a better understanding of the history of the languages in which they are interested; and also for advanced scholars who may wish to familiarize themselves with remoter parts of the linguistic territory. The Institute will be of advantage also to scholars who wish merely the opportunity of working during the summer at a large library, along with the privilege of association and discussion of problems with other scholars in the same field.‘

²³ His papers, whether read or (as they were more frequently) talked, were always admirably presented and crystal clear, alike to those familiar and to those unfamiliar with the language or the problem that he discussed. It was a cardinal principle with him that all matters concerning language should be of interest to all students of language, and he dreaded the thought that the Society might split up into sections like the Modern Language Association. For this reason he gravely deplored the growing unintelligibility, to him and to others, of the technical papers presented by some of the younger descriptivists.

²⁴ A full obituary of Kent, by George S. Lane, will appear in the first number of Language for 1953. It will be accompanied by a complete bibliography of Kent's published writings.—The Editor.

²⁵ He was very human indeed. He liked social gatherings. He liked his friends to drop in at his office and sit smoking and chatting with him, for which purpose he always kept on hand a liberal supply of cigarettes, though he cared little for smoking himself. In particular, on the day following a meeting of the Yale Linguistic Club, his office was always a rendezvous for little groups eagerly continuing the discussions of the previous evening. He enjoyed other sources of entertainment too: he liked pretty girls (and they liked him), and he liked burlesque shows. Concerning the latter, he loved to quote the late Justice Holmes, ‘Thank God I'm a man of low tastes.‘

²⁶ Compare the comments on his course by the Directors of the Institute at North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Michigan (Bulletin 15.18, 17.13, 20.12).