Prof Michael Samuels; Academic-
Professor Michael Samuels, who has died aged 90, was an academic who could lay claim to a world first.
One evening in October 2009, scholars from around the globe gathered at Glasgow University to witness one of the great occasions for scholarship of the past 100 years: the launching of the two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, the first-ever notional classification of the English lexicon throughout its history.
The event, the culmination of 44 years of painstaking scholarship, was marked by a series of speeches, but one stood out: a keynote address by an 89-year-old academic which set out elegantly and precisely, and with the speaker's trademark wry humour, the intellectual underpinnings for the new publication. The two-volume book sold out immediately, and reprintings and enthusiastic reviews followed.
The keynote speaker was Michael Samuels, professor of English Language at Glasgow University. His audience included many of those who helped to bring his initial inspiration to completion. Prof Samuels's death so soon after the publication of the Historical Thesaurus is a huge loss to scholarship, but it is a consolation that he was able to see the work in print. He died only a few days before the launch of the online Historical Thesaurus linked to the Oxford English Dictionary. Completion of the Historical Thesaurus will enable nothing less than a rewriting of the history of the English vocabulary through the examination of particular concepts in their semantic and chronological contexts.
Michael Louis Samuels was born in 1920, the son of a lawyer. He was educated at St Paul's School in London, and went to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1938 as a Domus Exhibitioner in Classics. War service with the Air Ministry interrupted his education from 1940, and he did not return to Oxford until 1945, where he transferred to the study of English language and literature. His teachers included such legendary figures as Alistair Campbell and J R R Tolkien. After graduating with first-class honours in 1947, he spent a year at Birmingham University as a research fellow before going to Edinburgh as a lecturer in the new department of English Language and General Linguistics.
Prof Samuels's time in Edinburgh was a crucial formative period for him: Edinburgh after the war was making a series of imaginative appointments in the area of linguistics and philology, and his contemporaries there included figures such as David Abercrombie and A J Aitken. The newly-appointed professor at Edinburgh was Angus McIntosh, who was just starting work on two major projects in dialectology: the Linguistic Survey of Scotland, and the Middle English Dialect Survey. Prof Samuels joined McIntosh in work on the second of these projects, and together they developed an unrivalled expertise in medieval English studies.
Prof Samuels continued to work on Middle English dialectology throughout his career. His move in 1959 to the chair of English language at Glasgow meant the Edinburgh-Glasgow axis became a dominant force in the historical study of English, receiving queries from around the world from fellow-scholars and postgraduate students and publishing a string of major articles on topics ranging from the standardisation of English spelling and the reconstruction of the language of Chaucer to the emergence of medieval Anglo-Irish.
A Glasgow postgraduate, Michael Benskin, and two Edinburgh postgraduates, Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson, joined Prof McIntosh and Prof Samuels in the development of the survey and, in 1986, its first major output, the four-volume A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English, appeared. A revised online version is about to appear, and, following on from this work, the Edinburgh team has produced atlases for Early Middle English and Older Scots.
.
In parallel with his major research projects, Prof Samuels was always interested in theoretical questions and, in 1972, he published Linguistic Evolution, described as "the outstanding book on the historical study of English".
Prof Samuels combined his high-level research with a career as a conscientious and committed university teacher. He was an inspired lecturer: no-one who heard his lectures ever forgot them. He was an exacting tutor, always expecting the best from his students, both undergraduates and postgraduates.
He insisted on the fine Scottish tradition whereby the professor in a department always lectured to and tutored first-year students. Some could find him fierce in debate, especially in his dealings with university administration or at academic conferences, but underpinning it was a gentleness; students or colleagues with personal difficulties found him both sympathetic and helpful.
He was also a humble man; although in retirement many came to see him, he never ceased to be genuinely surprised that people would want to talk with him about their work. His post-retirement career was one of the most fruitful times for him. Those privileged to see him in these years found a man always ready to engage with new thinking about a range of topics. He did so with humour — he was an inspired mimic, able to put on accents more or less at will. A visit to Michael Samuels was a reminder of what the academic life was for.
Prof Samuels was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1989, and – a particular pleasure to him – he was awarded the honorary degree of DLitt by Glasgow in 2006, a mark of the respect the university felt for one of its truly great servants.
He was a loving husband and parent; family life was important to him, and he never travelled far from home if he could help it. He is survived by his wife Hilary, whom he married in 1950, and their daughter Vivien. His sister Miriam Karlin, the distinguished actress, also survives him.
Born September 14, 1920; Died November 24, 2010.
Professor Michael Samuels, who has died aged 90, was an academic who could lay claim to a world first.
One evening in October 2009, scholars from around the globe gathered at Glasgow University to witness one of the great occasions for scholarship of the past 100 years: the launching of the two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, the first-ever notional classification of the English lexicon throughout its history.
The event, the culmination of 44 years of painstaking scholarship, was marked by a series of speeches, but one stood out: a keynote address by an 89-year-old academic which set out elegantly and precisely, and with the speaker's trademark wry humour, the intellectual underpinnings for the new publication. The two-volume book sold out immediately, and reprintings and enthusiastic reviews followed.
The keynote speaker was Michael Samuels, professor of English Language at Glasgow University. His audience included many of those who helped to bring his initial inspiration to completion. Prof Samuels's death so soon after the publication of the Historical Thesaurus is a huge loss to scholarship, but it is a consolation that he was able to see the work in print. He died only a few days before the launch of the online Historical Thesaurus linked to the Oxford English Dictionary. Completion of the Historical Thesaurus will enable nothing less than a rewriting of the history of the English vocabulary through the examination of particular concepts in their semantic and chronological contexts.
Michael Louis Samuels was born in 1920, the son of a lawyer. He was educated at St Paul's School in London, and went to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1938 as a Domus Exhibitioner in Classics. War service with the Air Ministry interrupted his education from 1940, and he did not return to Oxford until 1945, where he transferred to the study of English language and literature. His teachers included such legendary figures as Alistair Campbell and J R R Tolkien. After graduating with first-class honours in 1947, he spent a year at Birmingham University as a research fellow before going to Edinburgh as a lecturer in the new department of English Language and General Linguistics.
Prof Samuels's time in Edinburgh was a crucial formative period for him: Edinburgh after the war was making a series of imaginative appointments in the area of linguistics and philology, and his contemporaries there included figures such as David Abercrombie and A J Aitken. The newly-appointed professor at Edinburgh was Angus McIntosh, who was just starting work on two major projects in dialectology: the Linguistic Survey of Scotland, and the Middle English Dialect Survey. Prof Samuels joined McIntosh in work on the second of these projects, and together they developed an unrivalled expertise in medieval English studies.
Prof Samuels continued to work on Middle English dialectology throughout his career. His move in 1959 to the chair of English language at Glasgow meant the Edinburgh-Glasgow axis became a dominant force in the historical study of English, receiving queries from around the world from fellow-scholars and postgraduate students and publishing a string of major articles on topics ranging from the standardisation of English spelling and the reconstruction of the language of Chaucer to the emergence of medieval Anglo-Irish.
A Glasgow postgraduate, Michael Benskin, and two Edinburgh postgraduates, Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson, joined Prof McIntosh and Prof Samuels in the development of the survey and, in 1986, its first major output, the four-volume A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English, appeared. A revised online version is about to appear, and, following on from this work, the Edinburgh team has produced atlases for Early Middle English and Older Scots.
.
In parallel with his major research projects, Prof Samuels was always interested in theoretical questions and, in 1972, he published Linguistic Evolution, described as "the outstanding book on the historical study of English".
Prof Samuels combined his high-level research with a career as a conscientious and committed university teacher. He was an inspired lecturer: no-one who heard his lectures ever forgot them. He was an exacting tutor, always expecting the best from his students, both undergraduates and postgraduates.
He insisted on the fine Scottish tradition whereby the professor in a department always lectured to and tutored first-year students. Some could find him fierce in debate, especially in his dealings with university administration or at academic conferences, but underpinning it was a gentleness; students or colleagues with personal difficulties found him both sympathetic and helpful.
He was also a humble man; although in retirement many came to see him, he never ceased to be genuinely surprised that people would want to talk with him about their work. His post-retirement career was one of the most fruitful times for him. Those privileged to see him in these years found a man always ready to engage with new thinking about a range of topics. He did so with humour — he was an inspired mimic, able to put on accents more or less at will. A visit to Michael Samuels was a reminder of what the academic life was for.
Prof Samuels was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1989, and – a particular pleasure to him – he was awarded the honorary degree of DLitt by Glasgow in 2006, a mark of the respect the university felt for one of its truly great servants.
He was a loving husband and parent; family life was important to him, and he never travelled far from home if he could help it. He is survived by his wife Hilary, whom he married in 1950, and their daughter Vivien. His sister Miriam Karlin, the distinguished actress, also survives him.
Born September 14, 1920; Died November 24, 2010.
Prof Michael Samuels; Academic-
Professor Michael Samuels, who has died aged 90, was an academic who could lay claim to a world first.
One evening in October 2009, scholars from around the globe gathered at Glasgow University to witness one of the great occasions for scholarship of the past 100 years: the launching of the two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, the first-ever notional classification of the English lexicon throughout its history.
The event, the culmination of 44 years of painstaking scholarship, was marked by a series of speeches, but one stood out: a keynote address by an 89-year-old academic which set out elegantly and precisely, and with the speaker's trademark wry humour, the intellectual underpinnings for the new publication. The two-volume book sold out immediately, and reprintings and enthusiastic reviews followed.
The keynote speaker was Michael Samuels, professor of English Language at Glasgow University. His audience included many of those who helped to bring his initial inspiration to completion. Prof Samuels's death so soon after the publication of the Historical Thesaurus is a huge loss to scholarship, but it is a consolation that he was able to see the work in print. He died only a few days before the launch of the online Historical Thesaurus linked to the Oxford English Dictionary. Completion of the Historical Thesaurus will enable nothing less than a rewriting of the history of the English vocabulary through the examination of particular concepts in their semantic and chronological contexts.
Michael Louis Samuels was born in 1920, the son of a lawyer. He was educated at St Paul's School in London, and went to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1938 as a Domus Exhibitioner in Classics. War service with the Air Ministry interrupted his education from 1940, and he did not return to Oxford until 1945, where he transferred to the study of English language and literature. His teachers included such legendary figures as Alistair Campbell and J R R Tolkien. After graduating with first-class honours in 1947, he spent a year at Birmingham University as a research fellow before going to Edinburgh as a lecturer in the new department of English Language and General Linguistics.
Prof Samuels's time in Edinburgh was a crucial formative period for him: Edinburgh after the war was making a series of imaginative appointments in the area of linguistics and philology, and his contemporaries there included figures such as David Abercrombie and A J Aitken. The newly-appointed professor at Edinburgh was Angus McIntosh, who was just starting work on two major projects in dialectology: the Linguistic Survey of Scotland, and the Middle English Dialect Survey. Prof Samuels joined McIntosh in work on the second of these projects, and together they developed an unrivalled expertise in medieval English studies.
Prof Samuels continued to work on Middle English dialectology throughout his career. His move in 1959 to the chair of English language at Glasgow meant the Edinburgh-Glasgow axis became a dominant force in the historical study of English, receiving queries from around the world from fellow-scholars and postgraduate students and publishing a string of major articles on topics ranging from the standardisation of English spelling and the reconstruction of the language of Chaucer to the emergence of medieval Anglo-Irish.
A Glasgow postgraduate, Michael Benskin, and two Edinburgh postgraduates, Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson, joined Prof McIntosh and Prof Samuels in the development of the survey and, in 1986, its first major output, the four-volume A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English, appeared. A revised online version is about to appear, and, following on from this work, the Edinburgh team has produced atlases for Early Middle English and Older Scots.
.
In parallel with his major research projects, Prof Samuels was always interested in theoretical questions and, in 1972, he published Linguistic Evolution, described as "the outstanding book on the historical study of English".
Prof Samuels combined his high-level research with a career as a conscientious and committed university teacher. He was an inspired lecturer: no-one who heard his lectures ever forgot them. He was an exacting tutor, always expecting the best from his students, both undergraduates and postgraduates.
He insisted on the fine Scottish tradition whereby the professor in a department always lectured to and tutored first-year students. Some could find him fierce in debate, especially in his dealings with university administration or at academic conferences, but underpinning it was a gentleness; students or colleagues with personal difficulties found him both sympathetic and helpful.
He was also a humble man; although in retirement many came to see him, he never ceased to be genuinely surprised that people would want to talk with him about their work. His post-retirement career was one of the most fruitful times for him. Those privileged to see him in these years found a man always ready to engage with new thinking about a range of topics. He did so with humour — he was an inspired mimic, able to put on accents more or less at will. A visit to Michael Samuels was a reminder of what the academic life was for.
Prof Samuels was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1989, and – a particular pleasure to him – he was awarded the honorary degree of DLitt by Glasgow in 2006, a mark of the respect the university felt for one of its truly great servants.
He was a loving husband and parent; family life was important to him, and he never travelled far from home if he could help it. He is survived by his wife Hilary, whom he married in 1950, and their daughter Vivien. His sister Miriam Karlin, the distinguished actress, also survives him.
Born September 14, 1920; Died November 24, 2010.
Professor Michael Samuels, who has died aged 90, was an academic who could lay claim to a world first.
One evening in October 2009, scholars from around the globe gathered at Glasgow University to witness one of the great occasions for scholarship of the past 100 years: the launching of the two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, the first-ever notional classification of the English lexicon throughout its history.
The event, the culmination of 44 years of painstaking scholarship, was marked by a series of speeches, but one stood out: a keynote address by an 89-year-old academic which set out elegantly and precisely, and with the speaker's trademark wry humour, the intellectual underpinnings for the new publication. The two-volume book sold out immediately, and reprintings and enthusiastic reviews followed.
The keynote speaker was Michael Samuels, professor of English Language at Glasgow University. His audience included many of those who helped to bring his initial inspiration to completion. Prof Samuels's death so soon after the publication of the Historical Thesaurus is a huge loss to scholarship, but it is a consolation that he was able to see the work in print. He died only a few days before the launch of the online Historical Thesaurus linked to the Oxford English Dictionary. Completion of the Historical Thesaurus will enable nothing less than a rewriting of the history of the English vocabulary through the examination of particular concepts in their semantic and chronological contexts.
Michael Louis Samuels was born in 1920, the son of a lawyer. He was educated at St Paul's School in London, and went to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1938 as a Domus Exhibitioner in Classics. War service with the Air Ministry interrupted his education from 1940, and he did not return to Oxford until 1945, where he transferred to the study of English language and literature. His teachers included such legendary figures as Alistair Campbell and J R R Tolkien. After graduating with first-class honours in 1947, he spent a year at Birmingham University as a research fellow before going to Edinburgh as a lecturer in the new department of English Language and General Linguistics.
Prof Samuels's time in Edinburgh was a crucial formative period for him: Edinburgh after the war was making a series of imaginative appointments in the area of linguistics and philology, and his contemporaries there included figures such as David Abercrombie and A J Aitken. The newly-appointed professor at Edinburgh was Angus McIntosh, who was just starting work on two major projects in dialectology: the Linguistic Survey of Scotland, and the Middle English Dialect Survey. Prof Samuels joined McIntosh in work on the second of these projects, and together they developed an unrivalled expertise in medieval English studies.
Prof Samuels continued to work on Middle English dialectology throughout his career. His move in 1959 to the chair of English language at Glasgow meant the Edinburgh-Glasgow axis became a dominant force in the historical study of English, receiving queries from around the world from fellow-scholars and postgraduate students and publishing a string of major articles on topics ranging from the standardisation of English spelling and the reconstruction of the language of Chaucer to the emergence of medieval Anglo-Irish.
A Glasgow postgraduate, Michael Benskin, and two Edinburgh postgraduates, Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson, joined Prof McIntosh and Prof Samuels in the development of the survey and, in 1986, its first major output, the four-volume A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English, appeared. A revised online version is about to appear, and, following on from this work, the Edinburgh team has produced atlases for Early Middle English and Older Scots.
.
In parallel with his major research projects, Prof Samuels was always interested in theoretical questions and, in 1972, he published Linguistic Evolution, described as "the outstanding book on the historical study of English".
Prof Samuels combined his high-level research with a career as a conscientious and committed university teacher. He was an inspired lecturer: no-one who heard his lectures ever forgot them. He was an exacting tutor, always expecting the best from his students, both undergraduates and postgraduates.
He insisted on the fine Scottish tradition whereby the professor in a department always lectured to and tutored first-year students. Some could find him fierce in debate, especially in his dealings with university administration or at academic conferences, but underpinning it was a gentleness; students or colleagues with personal difficulties found him both sympathetic and helpful.
He was also a humble man; although in retirement many came to see him, he never ceased to be genuinely surprised that people would want to talk with him about their work. His post-retirement career was one of the most fruitful times for him. Those privileged to see him in these years found a man always ready to engage with new thinking about a range of topics. He did so with humour — he was an inspired mimic, able to put on accents more or less at will. A visit to Michael Samuels was a reminder of what the academic life was for.
Prof Samuels was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1989, and – a particular pleasure to him – he was awarded the honorary degree of DLitt by Glasgow in 2006, a mark of the respect the university felt for one of its truly great servants.
He was a loving husband and parent; family life was important to him, and he never travelled far from home if he could help it. He is survived by his wife Hilary, whom he married in 1950, and their daughter Vivien. His sister Miriam Karlin, the distinguished actress, also survives him.
Born September 14, 1920; Died November 24, 2010.
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