Tributes to John Bengtson from ASLIP Colleagues
It is with deep regret that I'm writing to let you know that John Bengtson passed away on March 3rd, 2024. This is a great loss for ASLIP and the Mother Tongue journal, as John had been one of the early drivers of both, along with founder Harold C. Fleming before his own passing. John's work on the Dené-Caucasian hypothesis, including his proposed inclusion of the Vasconic and Burushaski languages (which he grouped with the Caucasian languages in a Macro-Caucasian subgroup) has been some of the most rigorous and important work in historical linguistics of the past few decades. It was John's work with Merritt Ruhlen which originally caught my attention as an undergraduate and led to my own interest in long-range linguistics. John will be greatly missed, and we are thankful to him for his hard work in the past few decades, which will be his legacy.
Remembering John Bengtson (1948–2024)
The word "fellowship," which John used on occasion, seems to have expressed his attitude to the world, his family, the community of researchers, and to the peoples of Tanzania, which, as "Tanganyika," was what he called his "native land." John was generous with his time and his knowledge. As an editor, he took great care that texts that reached him would emerge improved. As a long-range friend, he will be badly missed.
I was inspired by first reading of John's collaboration with Merritt Ruhlen, and when I began my own foray into taxonomic research, he was unfailingly helpful and supportive. The case he made for the grouping of Basque and Caucasic, and the body of fine detail he presented in support, was indeed of the highest quality – and if there is any justice in the world it will be recognised for the breakthrough that it is. For me personally, the world is just that little bit smaller now that he is gone.
It was terrible to hear of John Bengtson's death. John was one of my best friends ever since 1986 when we began to communicate. In 1988 we met personally for the first time thanks to Vitaly Shevoroshkin and Harold Fleming at Michigan University, and after that, several more times: at Harvard thanks to Michael Witzel, at Santa Fe Institute thanks to Murray Gell-Mann, and finally in 2016 at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic during the conference of the International Association of Comparative Mythology founded by Michael Witzel (he was present too). In that time John spent several days in my home in Příbram, Central Bohemia. Many years ago, John offered to correct my English texts and has corrected literally hundreds of articles and several books, e.g. "Altaic Languages" or "Early Indo-Europeans in Central Asia and China." He was often the first reader and reviewer, and his comments were always very valuable for me. What is most important, John was a fine human being.
My first encounter with John was, like several others here, thanks to the chapter on Global Etymologies cowritten with Merritt Ruhlen, which radically altered my view of the linguistic past of humanity and changed the course of my life. In this respect, I would elaborate somewhat on Václav Blažek's claim in his excellent obituary above that John had always worked along impeccable Neo-Grammarian rules regarding linguistic reconstruction.
It must be obvious to any reader of said Global Etymologies, and of many other works of John's, that this claim is only true if one gets rid of the blinders most comparative linguists have adopted following the overstrict demands of the 19th century Neo-Grammarians themselves. Indeed, none of these Global Etymologies even attempt to exhibit the least recurring phonetic correspondence over different word series.
Admittedly, at the global (Proto-Sapiens) level, such recurring phonetic correspondences over multiple word series have for the most part been erased by the various well-known processes which make linguistic evolution a far from completely regular phenomenon: word replacement, morphological regularization (which make words phonetically irregular), and random changes such as epentheses, metatheses and metastases (er, not the latter ones).
John and Merritt's Global Etymologies, instead, exhibit multiple internal strong phonetic correspondences, sound by sound, in very long series of words belonging to too many languages (in particular, regularly reconstructed proto-languages, where available – which are many) for these strong correspondences to likely result from chance. What I mean by "strong phonetic correspondences" are correspondences that, for each sound of the presumed etymon, do not entail more than one or two common changes in the corresponding sound of its presumed reflexes, most often preserving, for consonants, at least the original place of articulation.
The result is that, granted, given the absence of recurring sound correspondences in these etymological series, one cannot be sure that any given presumed reflex truly is a reflex of the proposed etymon. However, the strict abiding to well-known phonetic evolutions warrants that most presumed reflexes really are descended from the proposed etymon.
In the only physical encounter I had with John, at the occasion of the 2010 annual ASLIP meeting, I was pleased to discover a man as gentle as he had always been in our mail exchanges since the mid-1990s. His generosity, already apparent from his correction of hundreds of Václav's articles and books mentioned above, also extended to the realm of ideas. When I submitted to him my paper on universal hum interjections, he immediately answered that they reminded him of a Proto-Sapiens root that he had taken over from Trombetti's work in a first run of the Global Etymologies he had made alone in the mid-1980s, but which they had left aside in the final version of the article cowritten with Merritt Ruhlen due to its brevity, so as not to expose themselves to criticism along the usual "chance resemblances" line.
It was the negative / prohibitive particle **ma, which I then found in over 600 languages from nearly all macrophyla worldwide, including over 60 ancient written languages, reconstructed ancestral languages and the ill-named "isolates," which certainly doesn't mean that these isolates really are isolated, only that they separated from their closest relatives too long ago for blindsided comparative linguists to be able to recognize their relatedness. And I think John was right to intuitively link hums and mas. As with Jakobson linking mama words to the nasal murmur mm of suckling babies without explaining – and most likely not knowing – exactly how, such intuitions are the true mark of great linguists.