LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS IN MELANESIA Journal of the Linguistic Society of Papua New Guinea ISSN: 0023-1959 Vol. 39, 2021 In Memoriam: John Dominic Lynch, 1946-2021 Malcolm Ross Robert Blust Australian National University University of Hawai’i Website: www.langlxmelanesia.com Email:
[email protected] Language & Linguistics in Melanesia Vol. 39, 2021 ISSN: 0023-1959 In Memoriam: John Dominic Lynch, 1946-2021 1 Introduction John Dominic Lynch passed away on 25 May 2021 in Port Vila, Vanuatu, aged 74. With his passing we have lost a pioneer of Oceanic Austronesian linguistics and a friend and mentor to so many of his colleagues and students and the people whose languages he loved to study.1 2 Childhood and youth John Lynch was born in Sydney on 8 July, 1946, into a Catholic family of Irish descent with a huge network of relatives of similar ancestry. His mother was Pat Conaghan, born in 1917, a high-school music teacher until John’s birth. His father, Gregory Lynch, born in 1913, was a chemical engineer. They had married in 1945, as World War II was ending. After John in 1946 came Denis in 1948, Jeremy in 1950, Brendan in 1955, and Reg in 1960. The family lived in Wahroonga, on the northern outskirts of Sydney. To judge from the first chapter of John’s unfinished memoirs, with its memorably dry humour, his was a stable and happy family. He writes frequently of playing outside with his brothers, and especially of finding places where he could play cricket with Denis, and sometimes with Nan, his father’s mother.