Murray Barnson Emeneau

Perhaps Emeneau's greatest achievement in Dravidian studies is the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (in two volumes), written with Thomas Burrow and first published in 1961. Despite the characteristic reserve that eschewed historical reconstruction, this work, revised in a 1984 second edition, remains the indispensable guide, tool, and authority for every Dravidianist.

Emeneau was named the Collitz Professor of the Linguistic Society of America in 1953, and at Berkeley he gave the Faculty Research Lecture in 1957. The recipient of four honorary degrees — from the University of Chicago (1968), Dalhousie University (1970), the University of Hyderabad (1987), and Kameshwar Singh Darbhanga Sanskrit University (1999) — as well as the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal from Yale and the Medal of Merit of the American Oriental Society. Emeneau was also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, an Honorary Member of the Linguistic Society of India and of the National Institute of Humanistic Sciences, Vietnam, and the sole Honorary Member of the Philological Society (the oldest professional linguistic society in the world).

Emeneau served as president of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in 1949 as well as serving as editor of the Society's journal, Language. In 1952 he served as president of the American Oriental Society.

Given the dire employment situation in the early 1930s, Emeneau stayed on at Yale after completing his dissertation, taking courses in the "new linguistics" being taught by Edward Sapir. Emeneau wrote:

Emeneau was born in Lunenburg, a fishing town on the east coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. Having distinguished himself in classical languages in high school, he obtained a four-year scholarship to Dalhousie University in Halifax to further his classical studies. On obtaining his B.A. degree from Dalhousie, Emeneau was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol College at Oxford University. From Oxford he arrived at Yale University in 1926, where he took a teaching appointment in Latin. While at Yale, Emeneau began Sanskrit and Indo-European studies with the Sanskritist Franklin Edgerton and Indo-Europeanist Edgar Sturtevant. In 1931 Emeneau was awarded his Ph.D. with a dissertation on the Vetālapañcaviṃśatī.

Murray Barnson Emeneau (February 28, 1904 – August 29, 2005) was the founder of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.