Margaret Langdon

UC Merced Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology Title Margaret Langdon Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5007j4b9 Journal Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, 26(1) ISSN 0191-3557 Authors Hinton, Leanne Miller, Amy Munro, Pamela Publication Date 2006 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology | Vol. 26. No. I (2006) | pp. 1-5 IN MEMORIUM Margaret Langdon LEANNE HINTON Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley AMY MILLER Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History PAMELA MUNRO Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles argaret Langdon, prominent linguist and professor and their diminutive but tough mother, who barely spoke Memerita of the Linguistics Department of the English, raised them by herself in San Diego. Dick was University of Cahfornia, San Diego, died on October 25, a roamer of the back roads of San Diego and Baja 2005, in Bishop, California, where she had moved recently California, and had many Kumeyaay friends himself. For to be with her daughter. She was the primary expert the adventurous Margaret, there was no better match. on the linguistics of Diegueno, now often referred to as Luckily, this was the time when UCSD was just Kumeyaay, an indigenous language (or set of very closely starting to develop as a full-fledged campus of the related languages) of San Diego County. University of California, and Leonard Newmark, the Margaret Langdon (nee Storms) was born in founding chair of the Department of Linguistics at the Belgium, and spent her childhood there, her teen years young campus, offered Langdon a position. With her marred by the traumas of World War II. Anxious to husband, her home (built by Dick), a child soon to come, put bad memories behind her, she emigrated to the her language of study, and a job she was to excel at all in United States after the War, her first job in this country San Diego, Langdon was there to stay. being for the Belgian airline Sabena. Eventually, she Langdon taught at UCSD until her 1991 retirement, became a student in the Linguistics Department at the chairing the department from 1985 to 1988. She and her University of California at Berkeley, receiving her Ph.D. family also maintained close relations with Kumeyaay in 1966. As a graduate student, she came to San Diego communities, visiting and being visited, accepting to do fieldwork on Northern Dieguefio, working closely the Kumeyaay way of life as part of their own. They with two fluent speakers of Mesa Grande Diegueno attended peon games and other tribal functions, often (also known as 'lipay Aa), Ted Couro and Christina with students. Langdon and her daughter Loni held a Hutcheson. Through her work with them, she created the memorial ceremony for Dick a year after his death in first substantive grammatical description of the language 2000 in the traditional Kumeyaay maimer, with a feast and for her dissertation. performances by bird singers. Life at the Langdon's was During this time, she also met her husband-to-be, filled with diversity. Parties at their house were generally Richard ("Dick") Langdon, who owned a piece of attended by a mix of professors and students, plumbers property in San Diego where he developed a large and tree growers, Kumeyaay singers and peon players, orchard of lychees and other exotic fruits while he and friends and relatives of all kinds. supported himself as a plumber. Dick, a lanky six-footer, At a time when many of her colleagues were was raised along with several even taller sibUngs by their interested only in what a given language could reveal 4' 10" Chinese mother, who had been brought to the about linguistic theory, Langdon was concerned with United States by her American husband. He had left the language as a complex and internally coherent system. family when Dick and his brothers and sisters were small. This concern is evident in her descriptive work on Mesa Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology | Vol. 26. No. 1 (2006) Grande, notably A Grammar of Diegueno: the Mesa typed without special symbols. This writing system is Grande Dialect (1970), the Dictionary of Mesa Grande immortalized in such venues as the name Kumeyaay Diegueno (which she published under the names of Highway, on Interstate 8 in San Diego County. Let's language consultants Ted Couro and Christina Hutcheson, Talk 'lipay Aa, written in collaboration with an eager in 1973), and several texts (Langdon and Couro 1984; set of graduate students, was a book full of excellent Langdon and Hymes 1998; Langdon 2001). grammar lessons, which—when mastered along with the Throughout her career Langdon recognized linguistic vocabulary from the dictionary—would aUow learners diversity in the Dieguefio area. She addressed the topic to develop impressive conversational proficiency. It is a impUcitly through her involvement in numerous distinct labor of love, with idioms, stories, songs, and illustrations tribal dictionary projects and language programs and blended in with the lessons. More recently, the Barona exphcitly in several papers (e.g., Langdon 1970a, 1976c, tribe worked with Langdon to produce a new dictionary 1991a), concluding in 1991 that at least three distinct for their own community, pubhshed by the tribe. She had languages could be recognized within the Diegueno begun work on a revised and expanded edition when dialect continuum. illness overtook her; one of her former students has now Originally trained as an Indo-Europeanist (e. g., taken over the project. see Langdon 1964, 1966; Malkiel and Langdon 1969), Langdon was also the founder of a long-Uved aimual Langdon was also fascinated by the prehistory of workshop on Yimian languages and their distant relatives Dieguefio and the other Yuman languages, and the within the Hokan stock. Later these Hokanists were larger, still controversial Hokan stock of languages with joined by hnguists working on Penutian, another stock which they are connected. She wrote many papers on the based partly in California. Through this annual meeting, a comparative or historical morphology and phonology strong core of linguists from many places and backgroimds of these languages. She also received a large grant from found camaraderie and inteUectual partnership. The the National Science Foundation to compile extensive workshops produced working paper proceedings that vocabularies and lexicons of Yuman, making a relatively were often the first pubUcations of graduate students, and early use of large-scale computational comparison. contain an enormous amount of otherwise unpubUshed Langdon was keenly aware of language as a vital part information on Yuman and other Hokan languages. As a of the heritage of its speakers, and devoted much of her service to everyone studying Yuman languages, Langdon career to working with Native American communities also kept a running bibhography of pubhcations, which to preserve this heritage. Children stopped learning she passed out at the workshops, and eventually published Diegueno several generations ago, part of the world-wide (1996c).The same year, she worked with other scholars to decline in indigenous languages as the global economy produce other useful bibUographies, on Hokan, Chontal, and world languages overran them. Yet the descendents and Jicaque (Jacobsen and Langdon 1996; Waterhouse of the last speakers are making efforts nowadays to learn and Langdon 1996; Langdon and Jacobsen 1996b). their ancestral tongues, even if they can only learn them Langdon also developed an archive of Yuman as second languages. Professor Langdon was a pioneer languages in the Linguistics Department at UCSD, in what is now a growing field of "linguistics for the affectionately known as the "Yuman Room," which community"— in her case, developing publications and included all pubhcations on Yuman languages and large materials for second-language learning by Kumeyaays. collections of unpubhshed field notes of many linguists. Among the first of its kind was a book of language lessons. Before moving to Bishop, she made arrangements for the Let's Talk 'lipay Aa: An Introduction to the Mesa Grande unpubhshed materials in the Yuman Room to be housed Diegueno Language (1975), co-authored with Couro. This in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley user-friendly book, along with the Dictionary cited above, Langdon was a talented and generous mentor to is still used today (in photocopied form, smce it is out of her students, as well as to students fi-om elsewhere who print) in Kumeyaay language classes. In order to write crossed her doorstep. Her door was always open to them, these books, Langdon devised a practical orthography, and she never gave the impression that she needed to again one of the earhest of its kind, that could be easily be doing something else other than talking to them. Her IN MEMORIUM | Margaret Langdon { Hinton / Miller / Monro Students were welcome in her home, and she and her 1970a A Grammar of Dieguefio: The Mesa Grande Dialect. husband and daughter maintained lifelong friendships University of California Publications in Linguistics 66. Berkeley. with them. It was through her leadership that the Yuman 1970b Review of A.C. Wares, A Comparative Study of languages became one of the best-studied language Yuman Consonantism. Language 46:533-544. famihes in Cahfornia, with students doing dissertations 1971 Sound symbolism in Yuman languages. In Studies in and other research on the various languages in that family American Indian Languages, University of California under Margaret's tutelage, and later with the guidance of Publications in Linguistics 65:149-173. her own students turned professors. Langdon's students 1974a Introduction and Notes to Dictionary of Mesa Grande have become professors in most of the major universities Diegueno, by Ted Couro and Christina Hutcheson. Baiming: Malki Museum Press.

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