Larry Trask has died
I've just known that Larry Trask died last Saturday. I know how much he liked to take part in sci.lang and I decided to post this here. Seems he was very ill since time ago, but every time he felt OK he used to write here and there, always with interesting points.
I knew Trask by email from the time of Basque-L, probably the first Basque resource of Internet. He was very much appreciated among Basque internet users. His work, History of Basque, is brilliant.
posted to sci.lang
Last year, The Guardian published "this interview": http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/interview/story/0,12982,984721,00.html
They compared Trask to Pinker and Chomsky there. And they remembered this note from his website
please note: I do not want to hear about the following: Your latest proof that Basque is related to Iberian/Etruscan/Pictish/Sumerian/ Minoan/Tibetan/Isthmus Zapotec/ Martian. Your discovery that Basque is the secret key to understanding the Ogam inscriptions/the Phaistos disc/ the Easter Island carvings/the Egyptian Book of the Dead/the Qabbala/the prophecies of Nostradamus/your PC manual/the movements of the New York Stock Exchange. Your belief that Basque is the ancestral language of all humankind/a remnant of the speech of lost Atlantis/the language of the vanished civilization of Antarctica/ evidence of visitors from Proxima Centauri. I definitely do not want to hear about these scholarly breakthroughs.
It clearly defines his humour, his knowledge and his true love for Basque, my language.
BTW, another Basque linguist died last week, Andolin Eguzkitza, at the age of 50, he was too young... A polyglot, writer and, as Trask, "euskaldunberri": not a native speaker, but an adult learner of our language.
Some notes on Sustatu, a Basque newsblog:
- about Trask about Eguzkitza, this and this one