In Memory of John D. Bengtson

Biographical Memoir

John Donald Bengtson, the oldest son of Hilding Bernhard Bengtson (March 2, 1913–June 6, 1967) and Doris Mae Furrer (November 20, 1922–March 23, 2002), was born in Tanganyika,1 where his father, a Lutheran minister, taught as a theological & biblical professor at Makumira Seminary, near Arusha2 in today's North Tanzania. Here John studied at Kiomboi Academy in the Iramba District of the Singida Region.

From his stay in East Africa John acquired a knowledge of Swahili. After relocating to the USA, John continued his education at Golden Valley Lutheran College in Minnesota (1966–1968).3 There he completed the two-year undergraduate degree program (Associate of Arts) consisting of Liberal Arts and Biblical studies. It was there that, among other languages, he became acquainted with Latin and Greek. During the following decade (1968–1978) John studied at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (Anthropology, Linguistics, and Scandinavian languages), completing the degrees of Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Master of Arts (MA). During this time, he made his living by doing occasional jobs. At the end of this decade (1977) he visited the country of his ancestors, Sweden, for several months in order to study Swedish language and literature at Grebbestad Folkhögskola.4

Throughout his professional life, John divided his time between his job and his linguistic pursuits. From October 1978 till March 2013, he worked as a property description technician at Hennepin County, whose center is Minneapolis proper, the capital and biggest city of Minnesota.5 In April 2013, thanks to his retirement, John could, for the first time, fully devote himself to linguistics.

Those linguistic interests had already been stimulated during his stay in multilingual Tanzania and they continued throughout the rest of his life. At first, his interest was in the Scandinavian languages, including Old Norse, although his first article specifically devoted to them appeared only recently (2016b with its Chinese version 2022c). On the other hand, his first published article analyzed the Indo-European numerals '10,' '100,' '1000' (1987).

Linguistic Research and Major Contributions

Practically all of the remainder of John's writings have been devoted to the so-called distant relationships between already established language families, including investigations of possible genetic relations between various isolates or substrate relics. He also concerned himself with the biographical histories of several scholars interested in these themes. In the following, we list the spheres of John's linguistic interests, with citations referring to his Bibliography (in alphabetical order):

Ainu – 1992b; 1996b; 1998d, e; 2000; 2009a.
Amerindian – 2021a.
Austric – 1992b; 2000; 2006.
Basque – 1994b; 1995a, b; 1996a; 1997c; 1999a, b, c; 2001a; 2003a; 2004; 2008b; 2009b; 2011a; 2013a; 2015c; 2016a; 2017a, b; 2018a, b; 2019b; 2021b; 2022a; 2023a; 2024a; 2024b.
Burushaski – 1997a; 2001a; 2010; 2011c; 2014.
Dene-(Sino-)Caucasian – 1991b, f; 1993b; 1995c; 1996c; 1997b; 1998a, b; 1999e; 2002a, b, c; 2004; 2008e, f, g; 2010; 2014; 2015b; 2023a.
Editor – 2008c.
General questions of comparative linguistics – 1991a; 2003b; 2007a.
Global relations among languages – 1994c; 1999f; 2007b; 1998a; 2009c; 2011d; 2013b; 2015a.
Kusunda – 1993b; 2020a.
Macro-Caucasian – 1990; 1991c, d, e, g; 1992a; 1993a.
Na-Dene – 2020b.
Nihali – 1996b; 1997d.
Scholars – Golla 2023a; Hodgson 2011b; Sapir 1994b; Starostin 1997f; 2005; Wescott 2001b.
Substrata – 2019a; 2021b.
Sumerian – 1995c; 1997e.
Yeniseian – 1998a; 2010.

As is apparent, the largest number of these publications are devoted to the Basque language and its genetic affiliations. In my judgment, John's best work belongs here too, namely the monograph Basque and its Closest Relatives: A New Paradigm. Cambridge (Massachusetts): Mother Tongue Press (2017a), an updated version of which was published five years later under the extended title Basque and its Closest Relatives: A New Paradigm. An Updated Study of the Euskaro-Caucasian (Vasco-Caucasian) Hypothesis. Piscataway (New Jersey): Gorgias Press (2022a). I would also like to mention John's Basque Etymology Database <TOB/EHL. http://starling.rinet.ru/> (2015c), which is extraordinarily useful and incomparably more easily available than the monograph. I myself use the Basque Etymology Database very frequently.

Despite the fact that John had never held an academic position, he became a respected linguist, continually increasing his knowledge of the diachronic linguistic history of several language families and isolates. Additional studies in anthropology and comparative mythology rounded out his education. John did not, however, remain an outsider to academic cooperation. In 1988 he was invited to participate at the International Symposium on Language and Prehistory, organized by Vitaly Shevoroshkin and Harold Fleming at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

From that time onward, he collaborated with the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory (ASLIP), founded by Harold Fleming in 1986. It was in that year that Harold began to publish the Mother Tongue Newsletter, sharing information about progress in the research of distant language relationships (in a series of 34 issues 1986-2003). In 1995, a regular scholarly journal, Mother Tongue, began to be published by ASLIP. John Bengtson was the editor or co-editor of Mother Tongue during two periods: 1996-2003 and 2007-2023, while at the same time serving as president or vice-president of ASLIP. In 2001 John also began to cooperate with the Evolution of Human Language project, sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute, thanks to the support of its founder, the Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann.6

Personal Recollections

My personal communication with John, which began in 1986 or 1987, was via written correspondence facilitated by Harold Fleming and Vitaly Shevoroshkin. During that period we exchanged several letters concerning global etymologies. In November 1988 we had a unique chance to meet personally at the International Symposium on Language and Prehistory, organized by those scholars. Our participation in that event was somewhat fortuitous, since at that time we both stood outside any formal academic affiliations—John worked as a property description technician at Hennepin County and I was a teacher of mathematics and physics at a high school of technology in Central Bohemia. But the great achievment accomplished by the organizers of that event was that they were able to get linguists from the former Soviet Union (and its satellites Hungary and Czechoslovakia) through the iron curtain to participate in this unparalleled symposium.

Beginning from this first meeting, we cooperated regularly. John sent me his manuscripts for comment, and I sent him my texts for corrections to my English. Since John usually added some comments to accompany his editorial suggestions, this made him the first reviewer of my manuscripts. Sometimes we collaborated on joint articles (1995c; 2000; 2005; 2009a; 2011c; 2012). In the year 2023 we began a collaborative study of the relation of Kartvelian to the Macro-Caucasian languages. One of my intentions for the future is to finish this project as a memorial tribute to John, since it was originally his initiative.

We were able to meet together twice in the year 2002, first at a conference organized by Michael Witzel at Harvard University and again at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, thanks to Murray Gell-Mann. We later met again two or three times at each of these places up until the year 2006. Our next meeting took place at a conference in 2008 devoted to the memory of Sergei Starostin (1952-2005) in Moscow.

The last time we met, however, was in 2016, when John visited my homeland, the Czech Republic. In addition to visiting me at my home, he spent time in the cities of Příbram, Prague, and especially Brno. It was in Brno (at Masaryk University) that Michael Witzel, Nataliya Yanchevskaya and two of my Ph.D. students from the Department of Linguistics and Baltic Studies, Zuzana Malášková and Kristýna Dufková, organized the 10th conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology.

In 2019, despite his mobility issues, John, along with his wife April, realized his dream: to return to the country of his youth, Tanzania. John's health took a turn for the worse in 2023 when he had to spend several months in a rehabilitation hospital in Tucson, Arizona. In the autumn of that year he moved to Sholom Home, an assisted living facility in Tucson, and then to a nursing home in Edina, Hennepin County, Minnesota, which he ominously predicted would be his final home.

On November 22, 2023, John wrote me, "I still hope to finish my book (proposed title: Introduction to Paleolinguistics)." Later he asked me for my article 'The Afroasiatic personal pronouns: a textbook example of a suppletive paradigm,' which was published in: Diachronic Perspectives on Suppletion, ed. Ronald I. Kim, Hamburg: Baar Verlag, 2019, pp. 239-270. This text was devoted to the prefix conjugation in Afroasiatic. As with many of my other articles, this one was also corrected by John.7

In a communication that I received from John on January 29, 2024, he concluded his email with two quotations:

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. —Albert Einstein

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. —T. S. Eliot

I could not know then that this was to be his last email to me.

After 37 years of collaboration, I am convinced that John was a man endowded with a strong but realistic imagination. He was not afraid to risk crossing the borders between language families that had, since the 19th century, been deemed unrelated and unrelatable. It is important to note that, in his work, he was always careful to employ the classical Comparative Method, as that method had been developed by the Neogrammarians in the early years of scientific linguistic study.

John D. Bengtson: Bibliography

The bibliography of John D. Bengtson consists of 105 titles, including articles, reviews, obituaries, and reports about various conferences.

Quoted authors or editors:

Václav Blažek
Department of Linguistics & Baltic Studies
Masaryk University – Brno, Czech Republic
[email protected]