Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Slavic linguistics has lost a major scholar with the departure of Dutch Slavist Willem R. Vermeer, who passed away after a long illness in September 2024.Willem's interests were not limited to Slavic linguistics, but he had a wide range of interests, including visual art, music, and literature.He was an accomplished and generous teacher and mentor, a devoted husband to Trille and father to their daughter, Wotienke, both gifted artists.He will be greatly missed in the Slavic field for erudition and insight.I first became aware of Willem's name when I was studying South Slavic dialectology and Slavic word prosody at UCLA in 1986, during two intensive graduate seminars given by Academician Pavle Ivić, then a visiting Fulbright scholar.The term papers he had assigned sent me to the University Research Library, where I found Willem's publications and those of other Dutch Slavists, who were among the few scholars writing in English on South Slavic topics.More than that, I was astonished to learn that Willem and other Dutch Slavists had conducted dialectological fieldwork in Yugoslavia (and elsewhere), rather than limit their analyses to dialect data only from published sources.There had been a common understanding in those days that that sort of thing was reserved for native speakers, and it was the lot of outsiders like me to do our dialect work in the library.In consultation with Academician Ivić I discussed my hopes to work directly with dialect speakers and he suggested that the right interlocutor was Willem, 1 for whom he had great praise as both a scholar and fieldworker, who also had close familiarity with Slovene.(My local role model was Ronelle Alexander, who had collected field data for her dissertation
Source: Slovene Linguistic Studies
DOI: 10.3986/16.1.10
Author: Marc L. Greenberg
Institution: University of Kansas
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4405287925