Desmond Cyril Derbyshire (10 September 1924 – 19 December 2007) was a

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

who specialized in

Carib languages The Cariban languages are a family of languages indigenous to northeastern South America. They are widespread across northernmost South America, from the mouth of the Amazon River to the Colombian Andes, and they are also spoken in small pockets ...

Background

He is best known for his work on

Hixkaryana Hixkaryana is one of the Cariban languages, spoken by just over 500 people on the Nhamundá River, a tributary of the Amazon River in Brazil. It is one of around a dozen languages that are described as having object–verb–subject word order ...

, known for its object–verb–subject

word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...

. Derbyshire's study of the language (as a linguist with the

Summer Institute of Linguistics SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is an evangelical Christian non-profit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to ex ...

) resulted in the first description in the

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

literature of a language with this word order as its default. The most surprising story Derbyshire told of the long period of work in the Hixkaryana village of remote northern Brazil concerned a day in November 1965, during the visit by then New York's

US Senator The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress, with the House of Representatives being the lower chamber. Together they compose the national bicameral legislature of the United States. The composition and powe ...

Robert F. Kennedy Robert Francis Kennedy (November 20, 1925June 6, 1968), also known by his initials RFK and by the nickname Bobby, was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 64th United States Attorney General from January 1961 to September 1964, ...

. The recounting of that three-day visit included how Senator Kennedy declared his decision to run for President of the United States.

References

* Pullum, Geoffrey K.
Obituary: Desmond Derbyshire (1924–2007)
3 Jan 2008,

LINGUIST List The LINGUIST List is a major online resource for the academic field of linguistics. It was founded by Anthony Aristar in early 1990 at the University of Western Australia, and is used as a reference by the National Science Foundation in the Unite ...

. Linguists from England 1924 births 2007 deaths People from Durham, England British expatriates in Brazil {{UK-linguist-stub