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: The AUR (btw I use arch) contains a *lot* of stuff, and if it doesn't I can sometimes wrangle a program into compiling from source from their github or whatever.
gollark: It's *automated* building from source, it's not that bad.
gollark: You can just `pacman -S whatever`, assuming it's available, or if it isn't I have the AUR.
gollark: Really? I find it easier because package manager.
gollark: I don't think Linux is massively hard to set up, just more problematic because software compatibility.

References


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