SEBEOK, Thomas Albert (“Tom”, Hungarian Tamás Sebők). Budapest 9.11.1920 — Bloomington, Indiana 21.12.2001. U.S. (born Hungarian) Linguist and Semiotician. Son of Dezső Sebők and Vera Perlmann. After school in Budapest in 1936 father sent him to Cambridge (Magdalen College) to learn English, 1937 moved to the U.S.A., naturalized 1944. B.A. 1941 University of Chicago (L. Bloomfield). M.A. 1943 Princeton, in anthropological linguistics (under R. Jakobson). Ph.D. 1945 Princeton (diss. in Finno-Ugrian). From 1943 taught at Indiana University in Boomington, retired 1991 as Distinguished Professor of Linguistcs. Several honorary doctorates, e.g. Budapest. Married 1947 Mary Eleanor Lawton (1912–2005, divorced), one daughter, and 1973 the semiotic scholar Donna Jean Umiker (b. 1946), two daughters.
Sebeok was a many-sided linguist. Himself he conducted fieldwork on Winnebago of Wisconsin and Aymara of Bolivia. At university he developed the study of Uralic, Altaic, Central Asia and Tibetan. He created zoosemiotics, developed semiotics and worked on psycholinguistics, ethnolinguistics and stylistics. Said of himself, “an academic Apis mellifera who darts ‘solitary from flower to flower, sipping nectar, gathering pollen from flowers, serendipitously fertilizing whatever’ he rouches” (Danesi & Valdman).
Publications: “An Examination of the Austroasiatic Language Family”, Language 18, 1942, 206–217; “Phonemic System of Santali”, JAOS 63, 1943, 66f.
– Diss. Finnish and Hungarian case systems: their form and function. Manuscript 1945.
– Edited: Current Trends in Linguistics. 5. Linguistics in South Asia. 832 p. the Hague 1969.
– Edited: Portraits of Linguists. A Biographical Source Book for the History of Western Linguistics 1746–1963. 1-2. Bloomington & London 1966.
– Much on Finno-Ugrian, on general linguistics, on semiotics and zoosemiotics, etc., more than 450 books and articles.
Sources: *M. Anderson, Am. Anthropologist 105, 2003, 228-231; M. Danesi & A. Valdman, Language 80, 2004, 312-317; *J. Hoffmeyer, Sign System Studies 30, 2002, 383-385; Wikipedia with two photos.
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