Terrence Kaufman Papers

Terrence Kaufman (1937-2022) was an American linguistic anthropologist who specialized in historical linguistics, language contact, and lexicography of un/under-documented languages of the world. The focus of the portion of his collection that is in the Benson Latin American Collection is on Mexico and Guatemala, with additional materials from other parts of North and Central America, and, to a much lesser extent, South America. His research on Germanic, Romani, Celtic, Semitic, and Indo-European languages is located at the Library of the American Philosophical Society.

As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, 1957-1959, he majored in Linguistics and Germanic languages, and he developed interests in English dialects, Romani, Austronesian, and Algonquian languages. In 1959-1960, as a student research assistant for Normal McQuown, he developed his life-long interests in Mayan and Mixe-Zoquen languages. Kaufman conducted his first field work in Chiapas, Mexico, from March to September of 1960, where he worked on Tzeltal of Aguacatenango and Tenejapa and Tzotzil of Chamula. He completed his graduate studies at the University of California Berkeley from 1960-1963. For his PhD dissertation (1963), he wrote a grammar of Tzeltal of Aguacatenango. During his long and distinguished career, he taught at Ohio State University (1963-1964), UC Berkeley (1964-1970), and the University of Pittsburgh (1970-2011). From 1970 through 2010 he spent nearly every summer doing field work in Mesoamerica; exceptions were 1975, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1991, and 1992. Much of his field work was grant funded, including grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies (FAMSI), the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas (INALI), and the National Geographic (NatGeo). However, all of his field work on Huastec (Mayan) and Huasteca Nahuatl was self-funded.

From 1970-1979 Kaufman directed the Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín (PLFM) in Antigua, Guatemala; the mission of the PLFM was to train native speakers of Mayan languages to conduct linguistic research on their own languages and the goal was a comprehensive survey of all Mayan languages in the country. The PLFM was staffed by US Peace Corps volunteers with higher degrees in anthropology and linguistics and paid Guatemalan native speakers of Mayan languages who, together, were tasked with carrying out a country-wide language survey to determine the extent of the linguistic variation in the Mayan languages, as well as their geographic boundaries and genetic and areal relationships. To carry out this work, project members devised a single orthographical system in 1970 that they used for all the languages they investigated. In 1989, a commission appointed by the government of Guatemala approved and officialized, except in one detail, the orthography promoted by the PLFM.

From 1993 to 2010, Kaufman co-directed the Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Latin America in Mexico. This project focused mainly on Zapotecan and Mixe-Zoquean languages, but also included a few Mayan languages and one language each from the Totonac-Tepehua language family. Mexico- and US-based volunteer linguistics and linguistic anthropologists (both students and faculty) were paired with paid native speakers of these languages every summer to conduct lexical research aimed at producing dictionaries of these languages. The dictionaries were supposed to be published by the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas (INALI), but this did not happen due to a change in INALI administration. Many of the boxes of fileslips in this collection are, essentially, the first drafts of these unpublished dictionaries.