Desmond C. Derbyshire

Desmond Cyril Derbyshire (1924 – 19 December 2007) was a linguist who specialized in Carib languages.

Background

He is best known for his work on Hixkaryana, known for its object–verb–subject word order. Derbyshire's study of the language (as a linguist with the Summer Institute of Linguistics) resulted in the first description in the linguistics literature of a language with this word order as its default.

The most surprising story Derbyshire told of the long period of work in the Hixkaryana village of remote northern Brazil concerned a day in November 1965, during the visit by then New York's US Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The recounting of that three-day visit included how Senator Kennedy declared his decision to run for President of the United States.[1]

gollark: Not really.
gollark: What we really need, clearly, is formally specified English.
gollark: Fine, I'll stick to standard English then. Mostly.
gollark: It Can Be, If We Make It That Way.
gollark: English Is However It Is Commonly Used.

References


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.