In Memoriam: John Thomas Algeo (1930-2019)

Abstract

Within English linguistics, there are certain academics whose body of work is so substantial, so significant, so fundamental to our current understanding of what the English language is and how it came to be that their surnames take on a kind of luminous aura. What Dylan, Prince, Elvis, and Mozart, Armstrong, Sinatra, Beethoven, and Lennon were to music, so were Trudgill, Svartvik, Quirk, Pyles, Leech, Greenbaum, Crystal, and Algeo to English linguistics. As university students, it was somehow beyond imagination that behind these surnames were real people, with real goals and dreams, challenges and defeats, lives and deaths. As university faculty, the scholarly legacy of these academics was as inspirational as it was awe-inspiring. I myself first came across Algeo’s work in my introductory classes in English linguistics. Required readings like The Origins and Development of the English Language (ISBN-10: 015507055X) not only introduced me — as well as countless others around the world —to the maddening yet magnificent processes that led to the formation of the English language today. They also gave delightfully tantalizing clues to the wondrous number of geographical, temporal, and social permutations it might take tomorrow. A few years later, as a graduate student in search of a dissertation topic, I stumbled across the book On Defining the Proper Name. I still remember how excited I was to learn that there was an entire branch of linguistics devoted to the study of names and naming. I had found my research topic. I wanted to study this history of official names used by the US Census for US American residents of African descent. That initial enthusiasm did not last long. My doctoral supervisor told me that onomastics was neither a serious nor a legitimate pursuit for a linguist. I still remember my profound feelings of frustration and confusion. How could it be that names, a linguistic phenomenon so seminal to every form of communication, had been resolutely relegated to the periphery of linguistic research? It was shortly thereafter that I made another discovery that steeled my resolve to stick to my original idea for my doctoral dissertation. The article that had such a profound affect upon me was published in a journal called NAMES. The article was “Is a Theory of Names Possible?” by John Algeo—the very same John Algeo whose textbooks were at the very center of