The Man who loved languages: a scholar with the ability and audacity to rebuild the Tower of Babel died a year ago, but his controversial project lives on.(Sergei Starostin)(In memoriam)

From: American Scholar | Date: September 22, 2006| Author: | Copyright information

"Next time, the origins of pitch accent in Old Japanese," Sergei Starostin called out to his graduate students as they left his afternoon seminar in historical linguistics at the Russian State University for the Humanities. No one in the room that day, September 30, 2005, had any inkling that with these words he was saying farewell to an illustrious academic career and to life. Half an hour later, he lay dead in a corridor from a massive heart attack. Starostin was 52.

The devastating loss felt by his wife and two grown sons was shared by colleagues within the field of ...

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