Robert Shafer was an amateur linguist who collaborated with Paul K. Benedict under the sponsorship of Alfred L. Kroeber on the original Sino-Tibetan linguistics project at UC Berkeley in the 1930s and 40s. He wrote the following short autobiography in 1963 in a French journal called Orbis. Thank you to Nathan Hill for helping me secure a scan of the article, and to Roy Andrew Miller for originally pointing it out in a footnote of his review of Benedict's Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus -- I will quote Miller's note in full below:
"The autobiographical sketch that Robert Shafer contributed to Orbis (12:1.350-353 [1963]) is interesting and important, not the least for its list of his publications on Sino-Tibetan, an impressive total of 18 articles in various journals appearing between 1940 and 1955, plus a book (the first volume of his Bibliography of Sino-Tibetan Languages, 1957, the second volume of which appeared in 1963--both these were to some extent, and the first volume almost entirely, further spin-offs from the S-T L [Sino-Tibetan Linguistics] manuscript volumes). This notice of Shafer and his work had escaped my attention until Professor South Coblin of the University of Iowa told me about it."
(Miller, Roy Andrew. 1974. Sino-Tibetan: Inspection of a Conspectus. Journal of the American Oriental Society 94(2). 195–209.)
For Benedict's memories of Shafer, see: Benedict, Paul K. 1975. Where it all began: memories of Robert Shafer and the Sino-Tibetan Linguistics Project, Berkeley 1939-1940. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 2(1). 81–92.
And now, our main feature:
Shafer, Robert.
1963. Collaborateurs du présent fascicule: Shafer, Robert. Orbis 12(1).
350–353.
I was born in the
sleepy little city of Findlay, Ohio, which never breaks into the metropolitan
newspapers except with quotations of the price of oil, for the headquarters of
the Standard Oil of Ohio are located there. My first contact with a foreign
language was with German. My grandfather Shafer
was an Alsatian who spoke both French and German, but he came to the
United States in 1818 and my father knew German when he was young, because
there were many German farmers in Ohio, but he had forgotten it before I was
born. But I had a German aunt that my mother and I would visit every summer,
and she had an old German Bible, and since I knew lots of passages more or less
by heart, I used to entertain myself by seeing how much I could read in German.
On her death she bequeathed the German Bible to me.
I wished to study
French in high school, but they did not teach it, so I took Latin instead. Class
was at 2 p. m., and we had two hours for lunch and always intended to get our Latin
lesson after lunch. But the river was nearby and we always found it so much
more enticing to pole a scow about on the river, pretending it was the Congo or
the Orinoco we were exploring, than it was to get our Latin lessons. We had a
very "easy" Latin teacher, and we would get back to high school about
fifteen minutes to 2, each one would pick out a sentence and rush in to the
teacher and say "Oh, teacher, I had a little trouble translating this".
Then we would all rush back, exchange translations, and remember long enough to
get through the recitation. The next year I wore the edges off my Caesar,
which I could take an interest in, but flunked the course. Not a very brilliant
beginning for a linguist. But I think it was the best thing that could have
happened to me. For we had moved to Tacoma, Washington, where the larger high
school offered courses in French. I got busy and learned the grammar the first
year, and a sailor on a Belgian boat gave me an old fashioned almanach in
French that had something on just about everything in the world, I think, and
from reading that on rainy days – and that is about seven months out of the
year in Tacoma – I got a very large vocabulary for a first year French student
in high school.
Between high
school and college I taught myself Italian. And when I was 17 I did my first
linguistic research, unofficially and without any grants. My mother and I had
returned to Findlay, Ohio, for the trip. In the city library in the basement of
the court house, I ran across Grimm's
Law, I think in one of the works of one of the von Humboldt, I suppose Wilhelm. It made a tremendous impression
on me to find that so many European languages were related but had diverged
through regular phonetic shifts. I hurried to my aunt's, only a vew blocks
away, and took Mark Twain's Huckleberry
Finn, which I had been reading, out on the front porch and worked out the
phonetic shifts for the southern dialect, used by the characters in the novel,
in comparison with standard English.
When we returned
West that fall, I entered the University of Washington. I was like Jack London discovering knowledge. There were
so many courses I wished to take that there just was not time enough. I
remember I had to "audit" my course in Old Irish, although I was the
only pupil in the class. I did not get credit for it, and the professor did not
get paid for it. We both did it for the love of Old Irish.
Between my
Freshman and Sophmore years I went down to raise a crop of potatoes on a little
ranch I had in central Oregon. I took Heine's
Harzreise with me and a neighbor's son who had attended the University of
Wisconsin lent me a book of Spanish short stories. While I should have been
cultivating or irrigating my potatoes, I was lying under a juniper tree reading
Spanish short stories or the Harzreise. The water would break out of its
channels and flood my potatoes. I lost $1000 on my summer's "toil",
but I came back to the university with enough German and Spanish to enter
advanced courses in the lyrics of those languages. At the University of
California I began the study of Russian and Chinese.
I did not study
"linguistics" because no such courses were given when I was a
student. Pliny Earle Goddard, then
at the Museum of Natural History in New York, gave me some offprints of his
work on Athapaskan and some of Edward Sapir's,
and this got me started working à la Sapir
– three years later I burned bushel basskets full of comparisons made in this
matter in the fireplace. I had covered much of the native languages of North
and South America and Oceania. A professor at Columbia University had had the
good taste to recommend Antoine Meillet's
Introduction for Indo-European comparative grammar and Roudet, a pupil of Abbé Rousselot, for phonetics, when I told
him I might as well learn linguistics in French. Later I wore out a German
dictionary getting the linguistic and phonetic vocabulary in reading similar
works in German.
After getting from
the Americas across the Pacific I came to the Austroasian and Sino-Tibetan
languages. Because of the difficulty of these languages they offered a real
challenge, and I have spent the greater part of my life on them. When I began,
I had to blow the dust off the tops of the books I took out of the University
of California Library, because they had never been used before. Now, some 35
years later, I have difficulty getting the books I need, for they are out to
another borrower.
Publications.
Sino-Tibetan.
"The
vocalism of Sino-Tibetan", Journal of the American Oriental Society
60 (1940), 302-337; 61 (1941), 18-31.
"Problems in
Sino-Tibetan Phonetics", JAOS 64 (1944), 137-143.
"The initials
of Sino-Tibetan", JAOS 70 (1950), 96-103.
Bibliography
of Sino-Tibetan languages, Wiesbaden 1954.
"Studies in
the morphology of Bodic verbs", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies 13 (London 1951, 702-724, 1017-1031.
"Khimi
grammar and vocabulary", BSOAS 11 (1944), 386-434.
"East Himalayish",
BSOAS 15 (1933), 356-374.
"Further analysis
of the Pyu inscriptions", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 6
(1943), 313-366 + 5 pls.
"Prefixes in
Tibeto-Burmic", HJAS 9 (1945), 45-50.
"Phonétique
comparée de quelques préfixes simples en sino-tibétain", Bulletin de
la Société de Linguistique de Paris 46 (1950), 144-171.
"L'annamite et
le tibéto-birman", Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient
40 (1940), 439-442.
"Phonétique
historique des langues lolo", T'oung Pao 41 (1952), 191-229.
"Newari and
Sino-Tibetan", Studia Linguistica (Lund 1952), 92-109.
"The Naga
branches of Kukish", Roczink Orientalistyczny 16 (1950), 467-530.
"Phonetik
der Alt-Kuki Mundarten", ZDMG 102 (1952), 262-279.
"The
linguistic position of Mru", Journal of the Burma Research Society
31 (1941), 58-79.
"Classification
of some languages of the Himalayas", Journal of the Bihar Research
Society 34 (Patna 1951), 192-214.
"Classification
of the northernmost Naga languages", ibid. 39 (1953), pt. 3, 225-264.
"Classification
of the Sino-Tibetan languages", Word 11 (1955), 94-111.
North American Indian.
"Penutian",
International Journal of American Linguistics 13 (1947), 205-219.
"Notes on
Penutian", IJAL 18 (1952), 211-216.
"Athapaskan
and Sino-Tibetan", IJAL 18 (1952), 12-19.
"Tones in
Wintun", Anthropological Linguistics 3 (1961), 16-29.
South American Indian.
"Algumas
equações fonéticas em Arawakan", Anthropos 54 (1959), 542-561.
"Aruakan
(not Arawakan)", Anthropological Linguistics 4 (1962), 31-40.
Indo-European.
"Implosive
finals in Indo-European", Zeitschrift für Phonetik und allgemeine
Sprachwissenschaft 13 (1960), 48-56.
African.
"Phonétique
comparée du Nigéro-Sénégalien (Mande)", Bulletin de l'Institut Français
de l'Afrique Noire, Ser. B, Vol. 21 (Dakar 1959), 179-200.
Ancient Near Eastern.
"Pisidian",
American Journal of Philology 71 (1950), 239-270.
"Lycian hrppi",
AJPh 67 (1946), 252-261.
"Greek
transcription of Lukian", Jahrbuch für kleinasiatische Forschung 2
(1951), 1-12.
"Lycian
numerals", Archiv Orientalní 18, no. 4 (1950), 251-261.
"Some Lycian
penalties", Revue Hittite et Asianique 52 (1950), 1-17.
"System of
relationship in Lukian", Die Welt des Orients 2 (1959), 484-501.
Austroasian.
"Études sur
l'austroasien", BSLP 48 (1952), 111-158.
And half as many
more.
