On Raimo Aulis Anttila

My acquaintance with Raimo Anttila was first remote when I was a graduate student in Chicago and his "black book", as he used to refer to his An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics, New York/London: Macmillan 1972) (subsequently since the second edition in 1989 with the phrase "An Introduction to" clipped off, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1989), was the main handbook in courses of historical linguistics in many institutions, an allegedly and admittedly difficult book to use as an introductory textbook, albeit great fun to read and an equally great depository of deep and multidisciplinary knowledge on the ways languages evolve over time and shape themselves in so many mysterious yet majestic ways. It was good fortune that brought me to Los Angeles and made Raimo my teacher and advisor in my graduate studies in Indo-European linguistics in the late '80s. As teacher and mainly as a scholar he had the deepest influence on my linguistic training, especially in areas that the norm in linguistic studies seems not to care about so much, such as the dialog between the disciplines of man, especially between philology and linguistics, with all subsequent sub-branches and subfields that revolve around the core fixture of language and its study. "Language is the product of history", he used to say in an emphatic way both in his writings and in his teaching, an idea that sounded a bit awkward to most theory-oriented linguists but which over the years gained an ever wider and more diverse audience, particularly so in fields like semiotics, socio-historical and cultural semantics, anthropological linguistics, if not in plain historical linguistics.

My humble contribution to his memory here (I should rather say, celebration of his life instead) will be based on two events that marked our partnership as (former) student and teacher and later on as colleagues and friends since my hooding and promotion to Doctor of Philosophy in Indo-European linguistics at UCLA. Both events took place in Ioannina (Greece) where I moved, the first in 1999 and the second 2009. The topic of two rounds of night-long discussions was, for the first, his book Greek and Indo-European Etymology in Action. Proto-Indo-European *aǵ-, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2000), and in the second round my then forthcoming book (in Greek) on the relation of historical linguistics and philology. In some ways, it was the same topic of discussion a decade apart.

In the first case, the main debate was the possibility of associating some of the material discussed in his forthcoming book with another word group of Ancient Greek that seemed to build a series of derivatives that looked very like the ones he discussed, i.e. from the Indo-European root *aǵ-: he believed that all his material belonged to the same etymological nest, while my suggestion was that part of it related to another root, namely *waǵ- 'strike; kill', and that the important Greek word ἄγος 'strike; religious awe; curse' was part of this word group. The discussion went on for quite some time afterwards, and finally he made way for my suggestion in an excursus in his book (pp. 264-266), acknowledging that things could go a different way from what he had originally thought and insisted on. The lesson here is self-asserting: Linguistics is said to be a very democratic discipline, and Raimo was flexible enough to adopt democratic procedures in his work. He was a person who was open to other ideas, even though going against his thesis, and an open-minded scholar, just as he was as a teacher: he would patiently listen to the student (or any discussant for that matter), bring his argument and counterargument, defend his thesis ardently but with ears and eyes wide open, but above all with mind ready to digest the food produced in a discussion.

The second round focused on my work. After all, the topic was the outcome of Raimo's idea, and I simply picked on it and developed it a bit further (see, among others, his 1975 fundamental contribution to the topic: "Linguistics and Philology", in R. Bartsch & Th. Vennemann, eds., Linguistics and Neighboring Disciplines, Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company 1975, 145-155). As his doctoral student, I had the opportunity to be a frequent listener of his and collaborate with him a lot. I was fortunate enough to be at UCLA's interdisciplinary program of study of Indo-European languages, linguistics and philologies, and was blessed to have some of the best scholars in their own field as my teachers. Raimo was one of them, and the long discussions with him on various problems left a strong mark on my thinking. His insistence on seeing little linguistic details within the wider philological, historical and cultural milieu affected my view as well, and one thing that made me think more was the way linguistics and philology relate and interact. Raimo always insisted that etymology, for instance, is "philology in small doses", and this epitomizes his approach in seeking historical explanations in linguistic phenomena, more especially in language history. Thus, the night-long discussion in Ioannina in 2009 was devoted to this very idea, as I was then completing a monograph on the relation of historical linguistics and philology. His knowledge and expertise on the matter was distilled like the local wine that accompanied the debate and the dialectic of that evening: clear, crispy, sharp, penetrating, sound and golden, just like the thunderous reverberations of Zeus Bouleus 'Zeus the Counselor' in his nearby Dodona sanctuary located in a whistler's distance from the spot of our conversation.

His words still echo today in my ears as if uttered yesterday, vivid, stimulating, Doric, spondaic, straightforward. The book came out two years later (Ιστορική γλωσσολογία και φιλολογία (Historical Linguistics and Philology), Thessaloniki: Institute of Modern Greek Studies 2011), but I am still with it today, striving to prepare an enlarged and updated English edition. That said, and having learned of Raimo's passing away, the least I thought I could do was to dedicate to his memory a volume I was editing at the time of the proceedings of an international conference held in Thessaloniki in 2021 on the very topic of our 2009 Ioannina overnight discussion (cf. Giannakis, G. K. et al., Classical Philology and Linguistics, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2023): his presence is secured in many people's hearts and minds, in the fond memories of our UCLA Friday colloquia, weekly seminars, and many weekend excursions to nearby sites or meals in the Santa Monica Promenade Thai and Indian food establishments. Everywhere his spirit was real, bright, insightful and inspiring; some of us tried to imitate it and get the best out of it. I consider myself fortunate to have received a call from him to move to LA in the Fall of 1984 and to have a chat with him that was to become a long dialog lasting a lifelong and beyond.

Georgios K. Giannakis
Department of Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
(email: ggianak@lit.auth.gr)