All Scholars

PULGRAM, Ernst

  • Ernst Pulgram
  • Date of Birth: September 18, 1915
  • Born City: Vienna
  • Born State/Country: Austria
  • Parents: Sigmund P., a tailor, and wife
  • Date of Death: August 17, 2005
  • Death City: Cushendun
  • Death State/Country: Ireland
  • Married: Frances McSparren
  • Education:

    Ph.D. (Romance Philology), Vienna, 1938; LL.D. (hon.), Vienna, 1990; Ph.D. (comparative linguistics), Harvard, 1946
  • Dissertation:

    “Das französische Theater in Lessings Hamburgische Dramaturgie” (Ph.D., Vienna, 1938); Theory of Names (Ph.D.,Harvard, 1946; basis of 1954 publication). 
  • Professional Experience:

    Asst. prof. Union College, 1946-8; U. of Michigan, 1948-79; Heyward Keniston Professor of Romance and Classical Linguistics, 1979-86; vis. prof. Florence, Cologne, Heidelberg, Regensburg, Vienna, Innsbruck, Munich, International Christian University (Tokyo). 
  • Publications:

    “The Theory of Proper Names,” HSCP 56-57 (1947) 252-5; “Indo-European Personal Names,” Language (1947) 191-206; “The Origin of the Latin nomen gentilicium,” HSCP 58-59 (1948) 163-87; “Spoken and Written Latin,” Language 26 (1950) 458-66; “Theory of Names,” Beiträge zur Namenforschung 5 (1954) 149-96; repr. as monograph (Berkeley: American Names Society 1954);  “Accent and Ictus in Spoken and Written Latin,” Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Sprachforschung, 71 (1953-4) 218-37; Studies Presented to J. Whatmough on His Sixtieth Birthday (ed.) (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1957); “A Report on the International Congress for Living Latin,” CJ 52 (1957) 301-8; “A Reply,” CJ 53 (1957) 123; The Tongues of Italy. Prehistory and History (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1958); “Proto-Indo-European Reality and Reconstruction,” Language 35 (1959) 421-6; “Linear B, Greek and the Greeks,” Glotta 38 (1959-60) 171-81; “The Oscan cippus Abellanus. A New Interpretation,” AJP 81 (1960) 16-29; “New Evidence on Indo-European Names,” Language 36 (1960) 198-202; “The Nature and Use of Proto-Languages,” Lingua 10 (1961) 18-37; “Synthetic and Analytic Morphological Constructs,” in Festschrift für Alwin Kuhn, Innsbrucher Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, 9-10 (1963) 33-42; “Latin at the Ecumenical Council,” Arion 2 (1963) 96-107; “In Rebuttal of Nothing,” Arion 3 (1964) 97-9; “The Accentuation of Greek Loans in Spoken and Written Latin,” AJP 86 (1965) 138-58; “Prosodics of Vowel and Syllable in Greek and Latin,” IF 79 (1974) 78-91; Latin-Romance Phonology. Prosodics and Metrics (Munich: Fink, 1975); “Venetic .e.kupeθari.s,” in Studies in Greek, Italic, and Indo-European Linguistics Offered to Leonard R. Palmer on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday June 5, 1976, ed. Anna Morpurgo Davies & Wolfgang Meid (Innsbruck: Inst. Für Sprachwiss., 1976) 298-304; “The Volscian Tabula Veliterna; a New Interpretation,” Glotta 54 (1976) 253-61;”Indo-European Passive Paradigms; Defects and Repairs, Forum Linguisticum 2 (1977) 95-106;  Italic, Latin, Italian: 600 B.C. to A.D. 1260; Texts and Commentaries (Heidelberg: Winter, 1978); “Lat. quaerere und queri,” Eranos 77 (1979) 157-61; “In pluribus prima: Elise Richter (1865-1943),” Romance philology 33 (1979) 284-99; “Pulgram’s Progress,” The Sixth LACUS Forum 1979  (Columbia, SC: 1980) 3-17; “Greek phi in Latin-Romance, V,” in Logos semantikos. Studia linguistica in honorem Eugenio Coseriu 1921-1981 ed. Horst Geckeler (Madrid: Ed. Gredos, 1981) 211-18; “Attic Shortening or Metrical Lengthening?,” Glotta 59 (1981) 75-93; Romanitas: Studies in Romance Linguistics, Michigan Romance Studies 4 (Ann Arbor, MI: Department of Romance Languages, 1984); “The Role of Redundancies in the History of Latin-Romance Morphology,” in Latin vulgaire-Latin tardif. Actes du Iᵉʳ Colloque international sur le latin vulgaire et tardif (Pécs, 2-5 septembre 1985) ed. József Herman (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987) 189-98; “Latin-Romance Metrics: a Linguistic View,” in Metrik und Medienwechsel = Metrics and Media, ed. Hildegard L.C. Tristram (Tübingen: Narr, 1991) 53-80; “…Quen legis ut noris…” in First Person Singular III. Autobiographies by North American Scholars in the Language Sciences, ed. K. Koerner (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1998) 159-85.

    Kleine Schriften: Practicing Linguist: Essays on Language and Languages 1950-1986, vol. 1 On Language (Heidelberg: Winter, 1986); vol. 2, On Languages (Heidelberg: Winter, 1988).  

    Festschrift: Italic and Romance: Linguistic Studies in Honor of Ernst Pulgram, ed. H.J. Izzo (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1980)
  • Notes:

    Pulgram entered the University of Vienna in 1934 to study classical and romance philology under Indo-Europeanist Paul Kretschmer (1866-1956), Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1890-1938), the founder of the Prague School of Structural Linguistics, and Romance philologist Elise Richter (1865-1943), the first woman to earn an habilitation and prior to World War I, the only woman to hold an associate professorship at any Austrian university. Following the  Anschluss of 1938 Pulgram was not allowed to complete his doctoral examinations  and he left Austria for Zurich in August 1938 then immigrated to the United States in April 1939. Once in America, he served in the Army (1941-3) before being invalidated out due to injury. under the G.I. Bill of Rights he was able to enroll at Harvard to study under the linguist Joshua Whatmough (whose Festschrift Pulgram edited) and Romance philologist Louis F. Solano (1904-92).

             After a stint at Union College, Pulgram moved to Michigan and immediately established a program in Romance linguistics with his colleague in Spanish, Lawrence Bayard Kiddle (1907-91). His teaching put many Romance linguists into the field and thereby expanded Romance linguistics in America.

             Pulgram described himself as a “practicing linguist” interested in the development of indo-european and its origins in Latin, though many of his publications treated French and Spanish. He saw the language of any given moment in time within its own historical and cultural context, but also in the full sweep of the development of Romance languages in general. The Tongues of Italy is a major study of the development of Italian from proto-Indo-European through Latin, the Renaissance, and up to modern form of the language, was criticized for a lack of specific citations of linguistic forms. His view that Latin had differing accents between the written Latin of the educated classes and the spoken Latin of the masses, as expressed in Latin-Romance Phonology: Prosodics and Metrics was widely debated.
  • Sources:

    U. Maas, “Ernst Pulgram,” Verfolgung und Auswanderung deutschsprachiger Sprachforscher, 2 (2004) 383-90; Steven N. Dworkin, “Ernst Pulgram,” Romanische Forschungen 118 (2006) 61-4.

    Photo: courtesy Guggenheim Foundation.
  • Author: Ward Briggs