Samuel Elmo Martin (29 January 1924 – 28 November 2009) was an American linguist known for seminal work on the languages of East Asia, a professor at Yale University, and the author of many works on the Korean and Japanese languages.

Biography

Martin was born in Pittsburg, Kansas on 29 January 1924, and grew up in Emporia, Kansas. During World War II he was trained as a Japanese Language Officer, and was stationed in Japan at the end of the war.

After the war, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in Oriental Languages. He graduated in 1947, but stayed on at Berkeley to study for a master's degree in linguistics under Chao Yuen Ren, which he completed in 1949. He then went to Yale University to study for a PhD in Japanese Linguistics under Bernard Bloch. He completed his dissertation on Japanese morphophonemics in 1950 (published as a monograph by the Linguistic Society of America the following year), and was immediately offered a position at Yale University, where he remained until his retirement in 1994. He was made professor of Far Eastern Linguistics in 1962, and chaired both the Department of East and South Asian Languages and the Department of Linguistics. He also served as director of undergraduate studies in linguistics and director of graduate studies in East Asian languages and literatures. He was an executive fellow of Timothy Dwight College.

Works

Books

  • (First US edition: 1954.)
  • (2006 reprint: .)

Articles and chapters

See also

  • Tadashi Kanehisa, Martin's informant for the Shodon dialect

References

  • The Linguist List Obituary
  • In Memoriam: Samuel Martin, Illuminated Korean and Japanese Languages