¹ Obituaries in Language were the subject, for instance, of a paper that Hope C. Dawson and I read at the Annual Meeting of the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences (January 7, 2005), entitled ‘A forgotten genre, the academic obituary, and the Language obituary project’, in which we announced a project (suggested to me once by Stephen Anderson and apparently thought of by others, we discovered) involving collecting all of the obituaries published in Language into one volume, as a contribution to the history of our field. We welcome any thoughts readers may have on such a project.

² Readers may wonder whether an obituary twelve years after an individual’s death is warranted. My answer is yes. While the writing and publication of this piece was delayed for various reasons, good history should always be welcome, so it seemed appropriate to me to run it. I confess that my admiration for Henry Kahane as a scholar played a role in my decision to memorialize him, inasmuch as he did seminal work on Greek, a language that is especially close to my scholarly heart.

³ A photograph of the desk can be seen on the Language website, www.lsadc.org/language/pics/pics.html.

⁴ This is what Richard Janda and I meant when we said, in our 1988 article (‘The how and why of diachronic morphologization and demorphologization’, Theoretical morphology: Approaches in modern linguistics, ed. by Michael Hammond and Michael Noonan, 193-213, San Diego: Academic Press, p. 194), that language change takes place in the present’, a statement that some linguists, in reacting to it, thought to be either trivially and uninterestingly true or just plain wrong (seeing language change rather as something that is over and done with in the past). Naturally, we disagree with them.

⁵ See, for instance, ‘Disemia’, Semiotics 1980, ed. by Michael Herzfeld and Margot Lenhart, 205-15, New York: Plenum Press, 1982.

⁶ This word exists as a technical term for a genus of moth; I leave it to lexicographers and morphologists to decide if my usage here constitutes a coinage or an extension or some other type of neologistic usage.

⁷ Not to mention other branches as well, such as the physical sciences, through, for example, the intersection of acoustics with phonetic research, and even engineering, through the relevance of methods and principles of computer science in computational linguistics.

⁸ These practices are discussed in a characteristically engaging way by Geoffrey Pullum in ‘Memo from AVC re divisional placement of linguistics department’ (Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3.1.107-12, 1985), a piece reprinted with some introductory annotations under the title ‘A memo from the vice chancellor’ in The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax and other irreverent essays on the study of language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 182-89).