Frans Van Coetsem

Frans Van Coetsem (Summer 1982; Ithaca, NY, USA)

Frans Camille Cornelis Van Coetsem (born April 14, 1919 in Geraardsbergen , Belgium; † February 11, 2002 ) was a Belgian ( Flemish ) linguist . After an academic career in Flanders and the Netherlands , he became a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca , New York ( USA ) in 1968 . There, after a few years, he acquired American citizenship .

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Frans Van Coetsem was born on April 14, 1919 in Geraardsbergen, a town in the southeast of the province of East Flanders on the Romance-Germanic language border . His mother tongue was the East Flemish dialect of his hometown. When he was very young, both parents died and the uncle and aunt who raised him sent him to a French-speaking boarding school . After completing his high school in 1939 he began a "regent" training (for example, "secondary school teacher") at a pedagogical college in Nivelles (that is, again in French), which did not satisfy him, which is why he broke it off in 1941 and went to the Catholic school University of Leuven to study "Germanic Philology". At that time, “Germanic Philology” encompassed Dutch language and literature , German language and literature, and English language and literature , as well as a number of historical and philosophical subjects. Before completing his studies, he worked as an interpreter for the British armed forces when the Allies entered Germany at the end of World War II . In 1946 he received his licentiate ; his thesis dealt with the theory of sounds and forms of the Geraardsberg dialect. Less than a year later, on April 30, 1947, he married his childhood sweetheart. In 1952 he received his doctorate with Ludovic Grootaers (1885-1956); his doctoral thesis was again devoted to the theory of sounds and forms in his mother tongue.

Even before his doctorate, he was appointed as an aspirant editor at the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT). He had to move to Wassenaar so that he could live close to his place of work in Leiden . At the WNT he was looked after by KH Heeroma , who also helped him with the choice of the topic of his “Aggregatie voor het hoger onderwijs”, which he received in 1956. His habilitation thesis, which was published in the same year by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW), signified a significant advance in the comparative linguistics of the Germanic languages and made him internationally known.

The next year he was appointed to the Catholic University of Leuven as the successor to his late PhD supervisor Grootaers, which is why he moved back to Belgium. From 1963 he was also an associate professor for comparative Germanic linguistics at the University of Leiden .

In the academic year 1965/66 Cornell University invited him for two semesters as a visiting professor . When Cornell then offered him a position as a “ full professor ”, he accepted it in 1968, mainly because of the research opportunities offered there, but also because he would mainly teach small groups of “graduate students” there.

At Cornell he supervised a number of Ph.D. -Students who all had academic careers. After his retirement in 1980 he was often involved in the supervision of “graduate students”. He also continued his investigations; he wrote his most important works on language contact even after his retirement. A few of them were unfinished at his death and were published posthumously.

About five years after the death of his wife, who died on January 26, 1993, Frans Van Coetsem was diagnosed with cancer and died on February 11, 2002.

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The teacher

Frans Van Coetsem knew how to captivate his students, whether there were more than two hundred in the lecture halls of the Catholic University of Leuven or less than a dozen around the big table in his Cornell office. His lectures were always well planned and he gave them with enthusiasm. Often times he was gripped by a true passion when dealing with a thesis or a dispute; then his board sometimes looked like a painting by an abstract expressionist - following didactic rules was not his thing. But his arguments were always crystal clear and he never lost sight of the central theme, not even when he deviated from it, invited by questions from his students. This happened often, for such questions were always welcome: he took his students seriously. (The informal interaction with students and professors at Cornell was also one of the reasons that drew him there.) He used such digressions to discuss problems that were bothering him at the moment, and thus showed his students what was going on The fringes of modern research and how to go about it.

As a doctoral supervisor, he had a gentle hand. He valued his students too much to intervene too drastically in their texts, and he didn’t mind if his students took views he disagreed with or used methods that were not his. On the contrary: if the work was reliable, he helped them improve it according to their own ideas. The diversity of the doctoral theses he supervised is therefore also remarkable.

The researcher

For Frans Van Coetsem, research was like a calling . What he published was always the result of thorough study, and his carefully formulated arguments had been thought through to the extreme. Two events in his life show what strict demands research made in his view and how demanding he was in his relationship to his own work. (1) As he was writing his doctoral thesis, he gradually came to realize that the young grammar framework in which he was working was out of date. Therefore he refused to publish the work - despite its excellent qualities. (2) The first edition of his “Aggregatie” (1956) was sold out fairly quickly, although it was a very technical piece of work, and the KNAW therefore issued a photomechanical print in 1964, albeit without Van Coetsem's knowledge. When he found this out, he had all unsold copies confiscated and stuck a message in them, which u. a. read: “Certain parts of some sections should have been changed or added for the second edition. I did not have the opportunity to do so, because the second, photomechanical print (1964) was published without my knowledge due to a misunderstanding. "

He could get very upset when researchers didn't take their work seriously or used it as a means of self-promotion. But he valued conscientious researchers very much and he respected their work, whatever their views or in whatever way they researched. The story of Toward a Grammar of Proto-Germanic is a good example of this. He had planned the book as the successor to Eduard Prokosch , A Comparative Germanic Grammar (1939) and invited some well-known comparative linguists to do so. Their contributions turned out to be very different, both in terms of their depth - which were suitable for a handbook, which brought top research - as well as in terms of their methods - which were committed to structuralism , which to generative transformation grammar . Frans Van Coetsem valued his authors and published their contributions without imposing any form or method on them, although that meant that the original endeavor had to be abandoned. So the book has become a collection of contributions 'To a grammar of the primitive Germanic ' and not an actual primitive Germanic grammar.

Frans Van Coetsem's research was varied (his knowledge of general linguistics was extensive), but mainly deals with four sub-areas.

(1) At the beginning - d. H. in his doctoral thesis and his work at the WNT - he dealt with the Dutch language . But throughout his life he researched his mother tongue, often about variation within Dutch: variation between the Netherlands and Flanders - his contribution on the state border between the two as a language border (1957) was referred to very often - and between dialect and standard language . He was also the scientist behind a very popular program on the standard Dutch language that was broadcast on Flemish television from 1962 to 1972. After his retirement, this interest in language variation would still flourish; see below, (4).

(2) Frans Van Coetsem was best known as a specialist in the comparative linguistics of the Germanic languages . Instead of considering the primitive Germanic for a temporally undifferentiated language, he was aware that “primitive Germanic” spanned a long period of time and that it should therefore be periodized. This knowledge, together with his phonetic and phonological knowledge [see below, (3)] led in the work The system of strong verbs and the periodization in older Germanic to a new classification of strong verbs in ancient Germanic, which differs from the traditional structure in seven Classes differ greatly and which explains many of their properties and later developments. An indirect consequence was also a new explanation for an old and tenacious problem of comparative Germanic linguistics, the origin of the so-called ē² . This is a long ē that appeared in Primordial Germanic - in a later period, according to Van Coetsem's view - and that differed from the long ē inherited from the Indo-European native language , the ē¹ . (The difference lives on in German: here comes from ancient Germanic * hē²r , true, on the other hand, from ancient Germanic * wē¹ra- .) - Mainly because of this work, he was invited to read the chapter “On the development of the Germanic basic language” in the short outline of the Germanic To write philology up to 1500 ; and it was probably the main reason for the invitation to Cornell. He deepened and developed these ideas until the end of his life, for example in his books from 1990 and 1994. In the latter he was the first to use the term Germanic Parent Language ; see Prägermanisch .

(3) Frans Van Coetsem's education included phonetics but not phonology , because when he was studying, phonology was a very young science. But in both he achieved excellent results. He belonged to the group that the first X-rays with contrast medium pronunciation of some vowels made of standard Dutch. The group worked at the Institute of Physiology at the Catholic University of Leuven, where Frans Van Coetsem also gave lectures, in addition to his lectures in "Germanic Philology" - he was already a supporter of interdisciplinarity in the 1950s . He was also a co-founder of the speech therapy department at that university. - Phonology was given an important place in almost every one of his publications on Primitive Germanic and the Germanic languages ​​[see above, (2)], and it was also the first aspect that he dealt with in his works on language contact [see below, (4)]. He was also interested in questions about the accent , e.g. B. in his Towards a Typology of Lexical Accent and in the last article, which he was able to get himself (2001). In it he proposed an original explanation for the "sharp contrast" in the lexical accent of British and American English ; Compare the British three-syllable pronunciation necess'ry with the American four-syllable necessary . The British accent is so strong that the neighboring syllables are disturbed or even disappear entirely: it is a language with an extremely dominant accent. This is difficult to mimic for non-native speakers, and so many non-native speakers have populated America that the inadequately reduced or still-present syllables in their language ended up becoming standard American English pronunciation.

(4) Frans Van Coetsem's interest in language variation blossomed in an in-depth study of language contact . He made a clear distinction between borrowing - e.g. B. a German speaker who also borrows the French [ɔ̃] with the French word balcon - and imposition - z. B. a German speaker who, when pronouncing the name Great Plains, imposes his [e:] on English and says [gre: t ple: nz]. This difference seems self-evident, and in fact it is. But no one had ever put it as clearly as Van Coetsem, and no one had suspected the consequences of this difference. A second factor that should not be lost sight of is the stability of a language feature. The vocabulary of a language, for example, very unstable, their morphology and syntax are much more stable. An English word like killer can easily be borrowed, but not its morphology: its German plural form is (die) Killer . In a number of publications, Frans Van Coetsem has developed these ideas further and used them to interpret all kinds of phenomena that occur during language contact.

bibliography

This chronological list only includes his books and other publications discussed in this Wikipedia article.

• Het dialect van Geraardsbergen: Klank- en vormleer (Catholic University of Leuven, 1952) (Unpublished doctoral thesis - see § 2.2; now in the library of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven .)
• F. Van Coetsem, G. Forrez, G. Geerts, J. Tyberghein Fonetisch Platenatlas (Leuven: Acco, sd)
• The system of strong verbs and the periodization in older Germanic (Mededelingen der KNAW, afd. Letterkunde, NR 19.1) (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1956) (New edition 1964; see § 2.2.)
• "De rijksgrens tussen Nederland en België as taalgrens in de algemene taal" in: A. Weijnen & F. van Coetsem De rijksgrens tussen België en Nederland as taalgrens (Bijdragen en Mededelingen der Dialectencommissie van de KNAW, XVIII) (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1957) pp. 16-28
• "On the development of the Germanic basic language" Brief outline of Germanic philology up to 1500 , ed. LE Schmitt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970) pp. 1–93
• Frans van Coetsem & Herbert L. Kufner, eds. Toward a Grammar of Proto-Germanic (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1972)
• Loan Phonology and the Two Transfer Types in Language Contact (Dordrecht: Foris, 1988)
• Ablaut and Reduplication in the Germanic Verb (Heidelberg: Winter, 1990)
• "The Interaction between Dialect and Standard Language, and the Question of Language Internationalization: Viewed from the standpoint of the Germanic languages" Dialect and Standard Language in the English, Dutch, German and Norwegian Language Areas = Dialekt und Standardsprache , ed. JA van Leuvensteijn & JB Berns (Verhandelingen der KNAW, Afd. Letterkunde, NR 150) (Amsterdam, etc .: North-Holland, 1992) pp. 15–70
• The Vocalism of the Germanic Parent Language: Systemic Evolution and Sociohistorical Context (Heidelberg: Winter, 1994)
• Towards a Typology of Lexical Accent (Heidelberg: Winter, 1996)
• A General and Unified Theory of the Transmission Process in Language Contact (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000)
• “A 'Violent Contrast' in Lexical Accent between British and American English” Leuvense Bijdragen 90 (2001) pp. 419-426
• "Topics in Contact Linguistics" Leuvense Bijdragen 92 (2003) pp. 27-99

Honors

• In 1964, Frans van Coetsem was appointed a corresponding member overseas for the Scientific Council of the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim. (He resigned in 1997.)
• On April 14, 1970, he joined the Overseas Corresponding Member of the Humanities and Social Sciences class at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences .
• In the summer semester of 1976 he was invited by the University of Vienna as a visiting professor for courses on Ur-Germanic and on neogrammatic, structural and generative methods in comparative linguistics.
• The Meertens Instituut invited him to give the main lecture of its colloquium on dialect and standard language (October 15-18, 1990). The 1992 contribution is an expanded version of this speech.

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In addition to what is included in the following references, the information in this Wikipedia article is based on Van Coetsem's publications and the six In Memoriam s that have appeared about him. All web links in this post were accessed in spring 2010.

• Buccini, Anthony F. "In memoriam Frans van Coetsem" Journal of Germanic Linguistics 15.3 (2003) pp. 267-276
• Buccini, Anthony, James Gair, Wayne Harbert & John Wolff [In Memoriam Untitled] Memorial Statements of the Faculty 2001–2002 (Cornell University)
• Leys, Odo “In memoriam Frans van Coetsem (1919–2002)” Leuvense Bijdragen 91 (2002) pp. 1–2
• Muysken, PC “Frans Camille Cornelis van Coetsem” Levens reports en herdenkingen 2005 (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen) pp. 32–35, also here
• Schaerlaekens, Annemarie "In memoriam Frans Van Coetsem (1919–2002)" L&A Alumni Logopedie en Audiologie (KULeuven, 1992) no. 3, p. 3; also here
• Tollenaere, F. de “In memoriam Frans van Coetsem” Jaarverslag 2002 (Leiden: Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie) p. 6

Individual evidence

1. ↑ This is the official spelling of his name. In his publications he often followed the Dutch custom by writing van in lower case when preceded by his first name (or its initial letter F. ). In English-language publications he alphabetized his name under v . American sources sometimes list Francis instead of Frans and VanCoetsem , in one word.
2. ↑ The "Aggregatie voor het hoger onderwijs" was then the Belgian equivalent of the habilitation . Frans Van Coetsem was one of the two people who received the “Aggregatie voor het hoger onderwijs” at the Catholic University of Leuven throughout the history of “Germanic Philology”; Marcel De Smedt Honderd jaar Germaanse Filologie in Leuven (1894–1994) (Leuven: Germanistenvereniging, 1994), p. 65; also here (PDF file; 285 kB).
3. ↑ "The best dialect dissertation I've ever seen," was de Tollenaere's verdict.
4. ↑ Obviously after a while, because the communication is dated February 1967.
5. ↑ Annie van Avermaet “Hier spreekt men Nederlands: een terugblik” Mededelingenblad van de Leuvense Germanists 18 (2005); also here .
6. ↑ Reconstructions as in Marlies Philippa et al. Etymologically, woordenboek van het Nederlands (Amsterdam University Press, 2003-2009).
7. ↑ It was also the last time that he was in Europe.