A Tribute to James Harris
If the names of past faculty in linguistics were inscribed in lights on a theater marquee, then one of its brightest, James “Jim” Wesley Harris, will have just gone dark. Jim died this past Sunday (November 10, 2024) at the age of 92. He died the way he lived, peacefully.
I met Jim when I came to MIT in 1977 as department head of the neonatal Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. By that time Jim had been a member of the linguistics faculty for four years, ten years after he had written his thesis, Spanish Phonology (1967) and nine years after he had assumed the chairmanship of the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics. Throughout his career in the department, he never relinquished his connection to the unit that first employed him at MIT.
Jim and his wife, Florence, are etched into the history of the department. Together the two of them wrote an incredibly detailed history of its beginnings. It can be found here: http://ling50.mit.edu/harris-development. Reading this history of a department that has been No. 1 in the linguistics world for so long, I am still astonished that linguistics was never a separate department at MIT, going from section status of one sort or another to full-fledged double department status without, as they say, passing through Go. This meticulous history should be required reading for every student in the linguistics program.
In her own right Florence was the miracle worker who copy-edited the seminal and enormous Sound Pattern of English. Legend has it that there is a typo somewhere in its pages waiting, like the lost chord, to be found. She also copy-edited English Stress: Its Form, Its Growth, and Its Role in Verse that I wrote with Morris Halle. Again, if there is a typo, I am yet to learn of it.
Building 20 was Jim’s linguistic home. Sadly, it no longer exists. When it did, it was laid out like a capital E. Jim’s office was at the very end of the middle bar, Wing C, I think it was. I would often make the trek from my office to Jim’s with some excuse for a visit just so I could get another glimpse of his cactus plant collection and hear his docent’s tale of their histories. My recollection of Jim is like that, a visit to his office, a chance encounter outside Jordan Hall after a marvelous concert featuring Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major. It was the only one Mozart ever wrote. Jim was a clarinet player. After his retirement when we spoke, it was mostly on the telephone. For some reason Jim liked the word “geezer” a lot. I suspect many of the calls were motivated by the opportunity it gave him to use it word freely in a conversation.
But as pleasant as all these memories are, I remember Jim most of all for being the consummate scholar. His articles were models of argumentation. They were assembled with all the precision of an Inca wall and all the beauty of a Faberge Egg. You couldn’t slip a credit card through any of its arguments, they were so superbly sculpted.
Indulge me if I end this remembrance with a poem that seems appropriate to this moment. It is from a collection entitled The World Is Filled with Empty Places:
Imagine a table surrounded by guests.
They eat; they smoke; they laugh.
Suddenly someone vanishes. In anguish
the host cups his hands, whispers a name
into the bowl. Each syllable drops
like alms for a beggar. Only the more
the bowl fills, the poorer he becomes.
That is how we are made paupers
by the names of those we love.
Samuel Jay Keyser
November 11, 2024