It would be hard to ferret out Joe's intellectual roots, since they were so widely spread, far-reaching and delightfully idiosyncratic. A lot of it, perhaps the initial core, goes back to traditional 19th Century philology and the Classics. But like all imaginative, restless people, Joe plucked his roots wherever he could find them, assembling them along the way without great worry -- as long as (in his judgement) they happened to fit for the task at hand. I found this refreshing tolerance of Joe's in the way in which he never chided me for my own haphazard way of seeking -- often post-hoc -- for appropriate intellectual antecedents. While he himself was so incredibly well-versed in the Classical tradition, he never felt bound by it, and never expected 'the younger generation' to be bound by it either. I have a feeling he may have secretly rued the cultural illiteracy of some of us (certainly mine), but was graceful enough to let us go on and do our work as long as the work was in an interesting ('the right'?) direction. I sometime wish I could feel, let alone practice, the same tolerance.In Joe's work most clearly than in any others', the transparent unity of typology, universals, diachrony and functionalism was manifest, indeed boldly proclaimed and painstakingly argued. His catholic tastes in languages and linguistics, his restless scholarship, his adventuresome curiosity, and above all his insistence of understanding and explanation, have inspired several generations of linguists and anthropologists. We will sorely miss him.
Tom Givon via e-mail, 9.5.2001
Obituary from the Stanford Report
Obituary from The New York Times
03.06.2003