In Memory of Raimo Aulis Anttila (1935–2023)

Raimo Aulis Anttila was born in Lieto, near Turku, Finland, on April 21, 1935. He was born in the sauna on his mother's family's farm, and took pride in his strong roots in southwestern Finland. Apart from spending some time as a war child in Swedish Lapland, where he became comfortable speaking Swedish and witnessed Saami culture and reindeer-herding practice first-hand, he grew up in Turku, attending school and then the University of Turku. There he studied English, German, Latin, and Greek, writing a thesis on the Towneley mystery plays of the late Middle Ages.

The next stop on his academic journey was a year at the University of Toronto, studying English and Linguistics, and then to Yale University in New Haven, to study Linguistics (under such luminaries as Bernard Bloch and Isidore Dyen) and Indo-European under Warren Cowgill, who supervised his 1966 dissertation on Proto-Indo-European Schwebeablaut. In 1965, Anttila moved to the Linguistics Department at UCLA, also participating in the interdepartmental program in Indo-European.

Apart from a brief period as inaugural Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Helsinki from 1972-74, he remained at UCLA until his retirement over 40 years later. He became a member of the Academy of Finland in 1995. In 2018, he moved permanently back to Turku, after many years of typically spending part of the year in Finland and part in California. He died in Turku on January 27, 2023, after a period of declining health. Many times he told me that if he ever wrote his autobiography, he would call it "From Tintown to Tinseltown", since the part of Turku where he grew up (and later retired to) was Pläkkikaupunki "tin town" and Hollywood, not far from Santa Monica where he lived, is popularly known as Tinseltown.

In such a short note, it is impossible to do justice to the full range of his research and publications. He covered so many areas – Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, morphology (especially analogy), historical linguistics, etymology, Peircean semiotics – and had good command of many languages (sometimes dialectal knowledge too) – Finnish, Swedish, German, English, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, Estonian, some Modern Greek, besides ancient languages Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. He was well read in cultural history, archaeology, philosophy, literature, and the humanities more generally, so that he often could draw connections where others couldn't. His analyses and use of evidence were rigorous.

He always had an open-mind, open to the evidence and working hypotheses, which probably was why he was more open than most linguists to "long distance relationships", and his relationship with numerous then-Soviet linguists from the late 1980s meant he was knowledgeable about their work. As but some examples of the broad range of his published research outside of his core areas, he published on Finnish affective vocabulary, the origin of the name Suomi (with me), Saami dialects, the Finnish outer local cases (with Eeva Uotila), spoonerisms, Cockney Rhyming Slang (with me), and the translation of names in Astérix (with Wolfgang Ahrens and myself). At least initially, many people (including me) learned their historical linguistics from his 1972 Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics (Macmillan) or its updated 1989 version, Historical and Comparative Linguistics (John Benjamins). He wrote this textbook/handbook at a fairly young age, which (as he told it) meant that many people who later met him, having only encountered his book, were surprised to find out he was still alive.

Anttila was modest, unassuming, principled, enjoyed reading, classical music, a good bottle of wine, and was most at home in nature—whether in California, Canada, Finland, or many of the other countries he visited. He will be missed by dear friends and colleagues, including those he mentored, around the world. Rest in peace, Raimo!