Read about Professor Emeneau's life.

I only talked to him on my graduation (May 2005), but I remember him as a very friendly man and a person who was very easy to talk to. I'm glad that I was able to thank him for founding the program.

— Francis Yoshimoto

I had the privilege of taking part in the MBE centenary celebrations at Berkeley last year and honoring him with a "pon2n2Adai" (gold bordered silk cloth) on behalf of the Bay Area Tamil Manram and Thendral magazine. The Thendral magazine had come out with 2 articles honoring Prof. Emeneau in its February 2004 issue celebrating his classic "Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (revised)". As the obituary states DEDR remains the indispensible guide, tool, and authority for every Dravidianist. During the Centenary celebrations, someone had taken the trouble to bring a taped message from the Todas. It was fitting that he was honored by the Sanskrit scholars with a "vidyAsAgar" title. I will always remember Prof. Emeneau standing in front of the 100th birthday cake with hands folded and saying what sounded like a Sanskrit sloka. (see the Thendral obituary and the pictures at: http://archives.aaraamthinai.com/thendral/anjali.asp) Even on his hundredth birthday he was passionate about languages and he remains an inspiration. -Mani M. Manivannan

— Mani M. Manivannan, Editor, Thendral Magazine

I was in the first group of graduate students admitted to the new Graduate Major in Linguistics at Berkeley, in 1952. Professor Emeneau, along with Haas, Beeler and Chretien, were our mentors and guides through a wonderful series of seminars and classes. Emeneau taught us Sanskrit and Indo-European with a combination of profound scholarly knowledge and irresistible charisma. Just a few years ago, (by then I was a retired professor of Linguistics at UCSC,) I was chatting with Murray at a party at Jim Matisoff's house. He said to me in that charming style he had, "After all, Bill, I AM your guru!" And, indeed he was, through all of my professional career We, his students and colleagues, will always remember him with profound admiration and love.

— William Shipley

By the time I came to Dravidian studies, Professor Emeneau had already retired from his teaching duties. However, I benefited greatly from meeting with him several times and from a lively correspondence with him over several years. His work, particularly on the nonliterary languages, has been a continuous source of inspiration. He was generous with his time and his ideas, lending me a copy of the first volume of his Kota texts when I could find a copy nowhere else, and writing a testimonial for my 1993 book on the development of Dravidian verb morphology. I would like to think that, through my mentor Bh. Krishnamurti, I belong to a gurukula that includes Professor Emeneau and his distinguished teachers. He will be much much missed by several generations of scholars.

— Sanford B. Steever

In 1981, when I was a postdoc at Berkeley, working with John Gumperz, I asked Murray Emenau, who was then already a professor emeritus, if he would talk to me about Edward Sapir , with whom he had once worked as a postdoc at Yale, and about Berkeley in the 1940s. Not once but twice Professor Emeneau insisted on taking me to lunch, though I felt that it was my place to pick up the tab since he was helping me. He was gracious and painfully candid. I rememebr that I was impressed to learn that he felt he had not adequately analyzed data he elicited in India during the 1930s and was continuing to work on/from his fieldnotes. At the 1984 Sapir centenary conference, I riled some Sapirs and was all the more appreciative that Murray Emeneau was one of the elders who encouraged me, although I did not presume this indicated more than his courteousness. I was impressed by his cogency at the Marry Haas memorial in the Alumni House and to see him at Walter Wolfram's presidential address to LSA, which was shortly after Emeneau's hundredth birthday. I greeted him at the former event, but did not want to strain his memory at the latter, very crowded event. A student of a Haas/Emeneau student, I feel that I should have done more to express my gratitude to and admiration for him before now. I hope that those who were his actual students were less neglectful than I feel I was!

— Stephen O. Murray

I was among the students at Berkeley during the early days of the lingistics department, even during the days before the department was establlished, along with Bill Bright, Bill Shipley, Bh. Krishnamurti, H.S. Biligiri, and others. The education I got from Murray and others at Berkeley was, I am convinced, better that I could have received anywhere else. I still remember clearly Murray's enlightening courses in morphology, comparative Indo-European, of course Sanskrit, and a seminar in Dravidian. I recall also being present when he was chosen as faculty research lecturer -- he gave his lecture on Dravidian. As a teacher, he was sincere, demanding, low-key, and good-humored. And we really learned a lot. In Sanskrit and in Indo-European he impressed us with the importance of the work of Sir William Jones, and so when Rice University celebrated the 200th anniversary of his famous address in Calcutta with a syposium in 1986, we naturally invited him to speak. He declined, saying that now that he was in his eighties, he wasn't travelling any more. Who would have thought that he'd go on another twenty years? His influence was present at the symposium through colleagues and students who attended, including Soren Egerod, Samuel Martin Roy Miller, Joe Greenberg, Win Lehmann, and Bob Oswalt. When we published the volume of papers from the symposium ("Spring from Some Common Source", Stanford Press, 1991) we dedicated it to Murray. The dedication reads, "To Murray B. Emeneau, Sanskritist, Dravidianist, Indologist, Linguist, Teacher, Gentleman".

— Sydney M Lamb

Prof. Emeneau, my mahAguru, was a constant inspiration to me during my years as a budding Berkeley Sanskritist. His inquisitive spirit never ceased. He would often stop me in the halls of Dwinelle to discuss Dravidian etymologies for various trees and insects. I cherish those moments and only hope I can be half the linguist he was.

— Chandan Narayan

It was my priviledge to meet Professor Emeneau in the year 1997. We had been tracing our family tree and by chance discovered that my father was the brother of Professor Emeneau's mother. She had failed to tell her children. We met with the professor in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. He was attending a function there and we drove from Ontario, Canada to meet him for tea. He was so excited about the discovery of a cousin of his and we had a delightful visit. At age 95 he was very active and I remember that he was with a family member at the time. She had left us with the professor and also said that he may tire and we should not stay long because of his afternoon nap. She left and the professor said, " don't pay any attention to her, I have no desire to have a nap at all. We spent a hour with him exchanging family stories and filling in a lot of blanks oof how we were related. My father jumped ship in Lunenburg at a very young age and ended up inn Labrador where he met and married my mother. No connections were kept after 1902. Our visit was a endearing memory for us. He was a fine gentleman. We tried to get information on thhe years way back and he was only interested in what was new in the world. He was a brilliant man with a wonderful sence of humour. We decided to let the Professor have his rest even if he said he didn't want it. We said our goodbyes and well wishes and walked to our car. To our surprise the professor ran by us at a runners jog, waving a hand as a goodbye and a wink in his eye. It is a terrific memory to have of such a brilliant man. His contributions were great, his spirit alive. We will miss him but never forget him.

— Robert King - first cousin of Professor Emeneau

I first met Dr. Emeneau in the spring of 1954 when I considered switching from mathematics to linguistics. He was supportive and suggested that I read Bloomfield's Language, which I did, and I discovered it was much more lucid and enjoyable than math textbooks. I enrolled as a graduate student in the newly established Department of Linguistics at Berkeley in the fall of 1954. I owe Dr. Emeneau and Madison Beeler an eternal debt for teaching me proper comparative methodology in the context of Indo European, and in Dr. Emeneau's case, Dravidian as well. I also had the honor of serving as Dr. Emeneau's research assistant on the first draft of his Comparative Dravidian Dictionary. Dr. Emeneau was my guru during my stay at Berkeley. He was kind, available, and a true scholar in multiple areas. I mourn his loss, as will all his students.

— Catherine A. Callaghan

I do not remember the exact date when I first met my great grandfather, but I remember him buying me football elbow pads when I was 14. We used to eat Chinese food every Christmas, and I never knew why this became a tradition in our family. Maybe because Kitty, his wife, grew up in China and moved her at age 12. I developed a taste for Peking duck because of him, and I wish he could be here for one more year. One of the last times I saw him was at the Faculty Christmas party last year. He was so sharp for his age, and feisty when I tried to help him too much. A strong and stubborn man at 101, who utilized his brain so much that even in his old age, made me laugh with his boyhood stories in Nova Scotia. He made me and a cab drive laugh at his sharpness on current events and his distaste of W. Bush and his policies. I loved him so dearly. He told me once after I left the marines that he could not help me get accepted to Berkeley; that I needed straight A's. I told him," I got straight A's. We went out to dinner at Genki Sushi off Marin months later, after I had just moved to Berkeley as an undergrad. He quizzed me and made me feel uncomfortably ignorant, and I love him for it. He was a true inspiration, and I hope to live in a fraction of the shadow that he accomplished in life.

— Paul Smith

He was teacher of My Teachers. My reserch guide Prof.B.RamakrishnaReddy always tells about him and his works. His works on Dravidian Linguistics are widely recognised. -DNRao(linguist@rediffmail.com)

— Deekonda Narsinga Rao

In 1980, when I was a graduate student in linguistics at Berkeley, I had the great pleasure to interview Murray Emeneau for the introduction in the Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. That year's meeting and volume were to be a festschrift for Professor Emeneau, and the whole society was kept busy vetting papers from a broad range of linguistic interests-- from Dravidianists and folklorists, to Indo-Europeanists and others. Murray and his wife welcomed me into their Berkeley home, and he spoke at length about his career and his concerns over the course of the discipline in the past decade. I was astonished by the size, scope, and quality of his life's work. He was a gentleman in all things and a devoted scholar and husband. We need more like him.

— Bruce Caron