Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

I’m sad to report that a friend to Chinese passed away earlier this month (h/t pinyin.info for passing along the news — more information available at John Wells’s phonetic blog).

I did not know Nigel well enough to write anything approaching a comprehensive obituary, or even a comprehensive view of his work within Chinese, but between a few personal interactions and quite a few more indirect encounters I developed a fondness for his scholarship and selflessness. He will be missed in many corners of the world.

Among scholars in linguistics/Chinese he was well known as an authority on Gwoyeu Romatzyh, a lesser-known but quite elegant romanization system for Mandarin. And unlike the proverbial scholar-fanatic who might rail against one and all who refuse to use his system, Nigel was more than happy to assist in cross-romanizing from GR into Pinyin, even providing a software tool for the task (which might seem a little obscure until you try making your way through a GR-based work such as Chao’s grammar without it, at which point it becomes indispensable).

He was also a frequent commenter on phonetics, Chinese, linguistics, statistics and beyond, especially on Language Log, with comments that consistently expanded and advanced the conversation without (as is all too common in blog commentary) any sort of grandstanding. Through hints and anecdotes we find out that he

• had deep knowledge of English dialects
• was keenly interested in minority language policies
• brooked no quarter with respect to cutting edge language scholarship, “I would suggest that the OED isn’t quite up to date…”
• once worked as an assistant keeper of Oriental books in the British Museum
• was the kind of commenter to whom people would respond, “Wow, nice!” — and really mean it
• simply put: quite defined erudition

Somehow I suspect that Nigel would have been too humble to have ever applied that poor, abused term, polyglot, to himself. But at least it’s fair to say that he knew about many languages far beyond Persian and Mandarin: Turkish, German, French, Finnish & Hungarian… It is a breadth and depth of knowledge that could turn what for other folks might be a throwaway statement…

“I don’t know of any other language that has precisely this combination of retroflex and nasalization” [emphasis added]

… into a reasonably robust hypothesis that “there are no other languages that have precisely…”

That last statement is taken from personal correspondence with Nigel and a group of others that led to this post last year. As the e-mail conversation took place over a couple of weeks he was invariably patient (with my lack of phonetics knowledge) and responsive to my continued inquiries — all this for a perfect stranger with only a shared interest in Mandarin.

Nigel Greenwood RIP.