Ilse Lehiste
{{short description|American linguist from Estonia}}
{{Infobox person/Wikidata
|fetchwikidata = birth_date death_date
|birth_place = Tallinn, Estonia
|death_place = Worthington, Ohio, U.S.
|image = IlseLehiste.jpg
|caption = Ilse Lehiste in 2009}}
Ilse Lehiste ({{IPAc-en|ˈ|ɪ|l|z|ə|_|l|ə|ˈ|h|ɪ|s|t|ə}} {{respell|IL|zə|_|lə|HIST|ə}}; 31 January 1922 – 25 December 2010) was an Estonian-born American linguist, author of many studies in phonetics.
Early life
Ilse Lehiste finished high school in Tallinn. In 1942 she began her studies at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Tartu. In 1944 she fled to Germany with her parents, where she continued her studies – while living in refugee camps – at the University of Hamburg.{{Cite web|last=Teras|first=Pire|title=In Memoriam Ilse Lehiste|url=http://vana.kirj.ee/public/Linguistica_Uralica/2011/issue_1/ling-2011-1-76-78.pdf|access-date=8 March 2021|website=Linguistic Uralica}}
Academic life and work
She obtained a doctoral degree in philology in 1948 at the University of Hamburg with a thesis on Old Norse, after which she taught at the Baltic University in Exile.{{cite news |title=Happy Yule Once More |url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/120005867/ilse-lehiste-1922-2010/ |work=The News Tribune |date=December 25, 1949 |location=Tacoma, WA |page=16 |access-date=March 2, 2023 |via=Newspapers.com}} {{Open access}} In 1949 she immigrated to the United States.{{Cite journal|last=Johnson|first=Keith|date=2011|title=ILSE LEHISTE|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23011629|journal=Language|volume=87|issue=2|pages=384–389|doi=10.1353/lan.2011.0037 |jstor=23011629 |s2cid=210072820 |issn=0097-8507}} She taught at Kansas Wesleyan University and the Detroit Institute of Technology, before beginning studies at the University of Michigan.{{cite journal|last=Johnson|first=Keith|title=Ilse Lehiste|url=http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/annual_report/documents/2011/Ilse.pdf|journal=UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2011)|publisher=Phonology Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley|accessdate=16 December 2013|pages=1–8|date=March 30, 2011}} She defended her second doctoral thesis – in linguistics – in 1959 at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, "An acoustic-phonetic study of internal open juncture," was published as a special issue of Phonetica (DOI:10.1159/000258062).
After working at the University of Michigan Communication Sciences Laboratory as a research associate from 1959 to 1963, she joined the faculty of the Slavic Department of the Ohio State University in 1963. She was a founding member and the first chair of the Linguistics Department at OSU, established in 1965. She remained at OSU as professor emerita after her retirement in 1987.{{Cite web|title=Remembering Ilse Lehiste {{!}} Department of Linguistics|url=https://linguistics.osu.edu/2011/ilse-lehiste|access-date=2021-03-08|website=linguistics.osu.edu}}
Her main fields of research were acoustic phonetics and phonology, prosody, language contacts, Estonian and Serbo-Croatian.{{Cite web|last=Lehiste|first=Ilse|title=Google Scholar citations|url=https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=ilse+lehiste&btnG=|access-date=2021-03-08|website=scholar.google.com}}{{Cite web|last=Beckman|first=Mary|date=2010|title=In memoriam Ilse Lehiste|url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/45FB6BD185EA60014B896C0198BF6991/S0025100311000296a.pdf/div-class-title-in-memoriam-ilse-lehiste-1922-2010-div.pdf|access-date=8 March 2010|website=JIPA}}
She was also interested in Estonian runic songs and, in collaboration with Jaan Ross, published several works on this topic (e.g., Ross & Lehiste 2001). During the Soviet occupation of Estonia, she helped to mediate research papers between Estonia and the free world.
It was also thanks to her that the 11th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in 1987 was arranged in Tallinn.{{Cite web|title=International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) {{!}} International Phonetic Association|url=https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/icphs|access-date=2021-03-08|website=www.internationalphoneticassociation.org}}
Her papers are archived at the American Philosophical Society.{{Cite web|url=https://search.amphilsoc.org/collections/view?docId=ead/Mss.Ms.Coll.62-ead.xml|title=Ilse Lehiste Papers, American Philosophical Society|access-date=May 8, 2019}}
Honors and functions
Honorary doctor at University of Essex, Lund University, University of Tartu and Ohio State University.
Foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and of the Estonian Academy of Sciences.
President of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS) (1974-1976)
President of the Linguistic Society of America (1980);{{Cite web |title=Presidents {{!}} Linguistic Society of America |url=https://www.linguisticsociety.org/about/who-we-are/presidents |access-date=2023-01-12 |website=www.linguisticsociety.org}} elected Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2006.{{Cite web |title=LSA Fellows By Name {{!}} Linguistic Society of America |url=https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/lsa-fellows-name |access-date=2022-12-31 |website=www.linguisticsociety.org}}
Medal for Scientific Achievement, International Speech Communication Association, 2002.{{Cite web|url=http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/honors/medals|title=ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) Honors and Awards|access-date=Mar 22, 2018|archive-date=March 22, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180322204854/http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/honors/medals|url-status=dead}}
Bibliography
Ilse Lehiste wrote or co-authored around 20 books and 200 research papers and criticism. A few key publications are listed below:
Ilse Lehiste. Segmental and Syllabic Quantity in Estonian. American Studies in Uralic Linguistics, vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University. (1960)
Ilse Lehiste. Suprasegmentals. (1970) Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press
Ilse Lehiste. Readings in Acoustic Phonetics. (1977) Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press
Ilse Lehiste & Pavle Ivić. Word and Sentence Prosody in Serbocroatian. (1986) Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press
Ilse Lehiste. Lectures on Language Contact. (1988) Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press
Jaan Ross & Ilse Lehiste. The Temporal Structure of Estonian Runic Songs. (2001) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
References
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Category:Linguists from Estonia
Category:American phoneticians
Category:Phonologists from the United States
Category:Estonian emigrants to the United States
Category:Estonian World War II refugees
Category:University of Michigan alumni
Category:University of Michigan faculty
Category:Linguistic Society of America presidents
Category:Recipients of the Order of the White Star, 3rd Class