Ilse Lehiste | |
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Ilse Lehiste in 2009 | |
Born | 31 January 1922 Tallinn, Estonia |
Died | 25 December 2010 (aged 88) Worthington, Ohio, U.S. |
Ilse Lehiste (/ˈɪlzə ləˈhɪstə/ IL-zə lə-HIST-ə; 31 January 1922 – 25 December 2010) was an Estonian-born American linguist, author of many studies in phonetics.
Early life
Ilse Lehiste finished high school in Tallinn. In 1942 she began her studies at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Tartu. In 1944 she fled to Germany with her parents, where she continued her studies – while living in refugee camps – at the University of Hamburg.
Academic life and work
She obtained a doctoral degree in philology in 1948 at the University of Hamburg with a thesis on Old Norse, after which she taught at the Baltic University in Exile. In 1949 she immigrated to the United States. She taught at Kansas Wesleyan University and the Detroit Institute of Technology, before beginning studies at the University of Michigan. She defended her second doctoral thesis – in linguistics – in 1959 at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, "An acoustic-phonetic study of internal open juncture," was published as a special issue of Phonetica (DOI:10.1159/000258062).
After working at the University of Michigan Communication Sciences Laboratory as a research associate from 1959 to 1963, she joined the faculty of the Slavic Department of the Ohio State University in 1963. She was a founding member and the first chair of the Linguistics Department at OSU, established in 1965. She remained at OSU as professor emerita after her retirement in 1987.
Her main fields of research were acoustic phonetics and phonology, prosody, language contacts, Estonian and Serbo-Croatian.
She was also interested in Estonian runic songs and, in collaboration with Jaan Ross, published several works on this topic (e.g., Ross & Lehiste 2001). During the Soviet occupation of Estonia, she helped to mediate research papers between Estonia and the free world.
It was also thanks to her that the 11th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in 1987 was arranged in Tallinn.
Her papers are archived at the American Philosophical Society.
Honors and functions
Honorary doctor at University of Essex, Lund University, University of Tartu and Ohio State University.
Foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and of the Estonian Academy of Sciences.
President of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS) (1974-1976)
President of the Linguistic Society of America (1980); elected Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2006.
Medal for Scientific Achievement, International Speech Communication Association, 2002.
Bibliography
Ilse Lehiste wrote or co-authored around 20 books and 200 research papers and criticism. A few key publications are listed below:
Ilse Lehiste. Segmental and Syllabic Quantity in Estonian. American Studies in Uralic Linguistics, vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University. (1960)
Ilse Lehiste. Suprasegmentals. (1970) Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press
Ilse Lehiste. Readings in Acoustic Phonetics. (1977) Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press
Ilse Lehiste & Pavle Ivić. Word and Sentence Prosody in Serbocroatian. (1986) Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press
Ilse Lehiste. Lectures on Language Contact. (1988) Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press
Jaan Ross & Ilse Lehiste. The Temporal Structure of Estonian Runic Songs. (2001) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
References
- ^ Teras, Pire. "In Memoriam Ilse Lehiste" (PDF). Linguistic Uralica. Retrieved 8 March 2021.
- "Happy Yule Once More". The News Tribune. Tacoma, WA. December 25, 1949. p. 16. Retrieved March 2, 2023 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ Johnson, Keith (2011). "ILSE LEHISTE". Language. 87 (2): 384–389. doi:10.1353/lan.2011.0037. ISSN 0097-8507. JSTOR 23011629. S2CID 210072820.
- Johnson, Keith (March 30, 2011). "Ilse Lehiste" (PDF). UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2011). Phonology Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley: 1–8. Retrieved 16 December 2013.
- "Remembering Ilse Lehiste | Department of Linguistics". linguistics.osu.edu. Retrieved 2021-03-08.
- Lehiste, Ilse. "Google Scholar citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2021-03-08.
- Beckman, Mary (2010). "In memoriam Ilse Lehiste" (PDF). JIPA. Retrieved 8 March 2010.
- "International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) | International Phonetic Association". www.internationalphoneticassociation.org. Retrieved 2021-03-08.
- "Ilse Lehiste Papers, American Philosophical Society". Retrieved May 8, 2019.
- "Presidents | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2023-01-12.
- "LSA Fellows By Name | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2022-12-31.
- "ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) Honors and Awards". Archived from the original on March 22, 2018. Retrieved Mar 22, 2018.
- 1922 births
- 2010 deaths
- Linguists from Estonia
- Phoneticians
- Phonologists from the United States
- Estonian emigrants to the United States
- Estonian World War II refugees
- University of Michigan alumni
- University of Michigan faculty
- Writers from Tallinn
- Linguistic Society of America presidents
- Women linguists
- Recipients of the Order of the White Star, 3rd Class
- Ohio State University faculty
- Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America