Ilse Lehiste

Her father was a military man, and beyond that the sources are not agreed: Epp Annus, in Eesti Elu (Estonian World Review), has her born into the family of an army captain, while Jaan Ross writes in Sirp that her father belonged to the higher ranks of the Republic of Estonia’s officer corps. The difference is not idle — in 1944 it was exactly what decided whether flight was a choice or the only option. No source reachable from here gives either parent’s name.

Keith Johnson’s obituary in Language puts her languages briefly and exactly: she went on picking up new ones all her life, “building on the Estonian, German, and Russian of her young days”. The school was Elfriede Lender’s private gymnasium for girls — opened on 9 September 1907 at Suur-Karja 13 with eighty-one girls, most of them Estonian and from poor families, taught in Russian until 1918 and in Estonian after it. Estonian obituaries say she finished the Lender gymnasium during the German occupation. That is hard to square with the fact that Lender’s private gymnasium was liquidated on 1 August 1940, when every private school was nationalised. The page gives both and does not choose between them.

Between school and university came one year at the Tallinn Conservatory, studying piano. In the biographies that line sits between two more important ones and looks like a delay. Ten years later, in America, it was her second income: she played accompanist in a dance studio. The first was washing dishes.

Almost nothing survives of those years but the dates. Where the family lived in Tallinn, where she was born, who taught her, whether she wrote anything — no source reachable from here says. Those holes are not hidden on this page; they are set out as a list at the end of it.

Sirp: Ilse Lehiste 31.01.1922–25.12.2010 · Keith Johnson: Ilse Lehiste. Language 87 (2), 2011, pp. 384–389 · Keith Johnson: Ilse Lehiste. The obituary’s open version, UC Berkeley PhonLab Annual Report 7 (2011) · Epp Annus: Ilse Lehiste. Eesti Elu (Estonian World Review), 7 January 2011 · Estonian Wikipedia: Elfriede Lenderi Eragümnaasium (CC BY-SA 4.0, adapted here)

Teaching resumed at the University of Tartu on 31 January 1942 — Ilse Lehiste’s twentieth birthday. The German occupation authorities at first allowed only the medical, veterinary and agricultural faculties to open; the rest, theology excepted, opened on 15 October 1942. Hers was among them.

She matriculated in 1942 into the Faculty of Philosophy and took three subjects at once: Germanic philology, English philology and classical philology. Estonian was not among them. She kept at all three until the flight cut the studies short.

That is worth reading twice. The Estonian language she later measured in milliseconds, and about whose three degrees she said the thing that is still quoted, was not a subject she studied. She reached it by way of German, English, Latin and Greek — and only from America, sixteen years later. She left Tartu without a degree.

In mid-August 1944 the war came close to Tartu: the Red Army’s 3rd Baltic Front moved against the Marienburg defensive line in south-east Estonia and north-east Latvia, and ordinary life in the university town came apart. No source found names a single person who taught her at Tartu; no piece of writing from those years survives that could be traced. Two years of which what remains is what she did not study.

Estonian Wikipedia: Tartu Ülikooli ajalugu (the reopening of 1942) (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Jaan Ross in Sirp: Ilse Lehiste esimesest doktoriväitekirjast ja sellega seonduvast (25 March 2022) · Epp Annus: Ilse Lehiste. Eesti Elu (Estonian World Review), 7 January 2011 · Sirp: Ilse Lehiste 31.01.1922–25.12.2010 · Martin Jaigma, Tartu City Museum: Saatuseaasta 1944 – suur põgenemine Tartust (26 September 2024)

Jaan Ross says why. Her father belonged to the higher ranks of the Republic of Estonia’s military, and with the Soviet advance that meant flight was the only thing that would save the family from certain arrest, deportation or execution. It was not a choice between countries. It was a choice between leaving and what would otherwise have come.

She was twenty-two. By the Estonian Wikipedia’s article on the great flight, around 80 000 people left Estonia in 1944 and roughly 40 000 of them reached Germany by ship and overland; the stream towards Germany began in the summer and peaked in September, on military transports out of Pärnu, Paldiski and Tallinn. There were two streams, one across the sea to Sweden — close to 30 000 people got there — and one towards Germany. They took the second.

What it cost is in the obituaries a line at a time. Her brother — her only sibling — was conscripted into the Soviet Army and died in the war; no source gives his name, his age or where. Her father died during the German years. English-language obituaries say only that he died; Jaan Ross reports in Sirp, on the account of Lehiste’s acquaintance the psychiatrist Stella Karolin, that he took his own life in Hamburg. The page gives both and does not choose.

And one sentence from her mother, which Ross also records. Her mother was so broken by the losses of those years that she told her daughter: if you marry, I will die. Ilse Lehiste never married. Her mother moved to Columbus with her, Keith Johnson’s obituary says, and died about a year after the daughter joined Ohio State in 1963.

Ohio State Linguistics: Remembering Ilse Lehiste — the eulogies of Craige Roberts and Jaan Ross, and colleagues’ tributes · Jaan Ross in Sirp: Ilse Lehiste esimesest doktoriväitekirjast ja sellega seonduvast (25 March 2022) · Estonian Wikipedia: Suur põgenemine (CC BY-SA 4.0, adapted here) · Kaja Kumer-Haukanõmm: 1944. aasta suur põgenemine ja eliidi lahkumine Eestist (Tuna 4/2014) · Keith Johnson: Ilse Lehiste. Language 87 (2), 2011, pp. 384–389 · Keith Johnson: Ilse Lehiste. The obituary’s open version, UC Berkeley PhonLab Annual Report 7 (2011)

Where she was between 1944 and 1946 the sources part. The Sirp obituary and the Latvian portal Livones.net say she continued her interrupted studies first at the University of Leipzig and only then at Hamburg; English Wikipedia and the Ohio State memorial mention Hamburg alone. Neither side gives a semester or a date.

On 2 January 1946 the translator-typist Ilse Lehiste joined the Estonian group organising the Baltic University. It is the earliest precisely dated employment the sources give her in Germany. The university began teaching on 14 March 1946 in the building of the Museum of Hamburg History — Postimees says 16 March — and by the end of the first semester had 1 025 students, 154 of them Estonians, and 131 teaching staff, 25 of them Estonian. In early 1947 it moved to the former Eggerstedt Luftwaffe barracks at Pinneberg. As a student she was registered there only as a free auditor. On 8 July 1947 she became deputy chair of the Estonian Academic Club. Felix Oinas, who came as a guest lecturer, remembered her as one of his most serious students.

The degree ran through the other place. She matriculated at the University of Hamburg in the winter semester of 1946/47; the typescript was finished on 14 November 1947 and runs to 115 pages; the oral examination took two days, 26 and 27 February 1948; she was promoted Doctor of Philology on 12 July 1948. Her supervisor was the Hamburg Anglicist Wolff, whom Ross calls Jakob and German reference works call Emil — Jakob being the first of his three given names; in 1945 the British had appointed him the university’s first post-war rector.

The dissertation was called “Über die Ethik der nach altnordischen Quellen geschaffenen Werke von William Morris” — on the ethics of the works William Morris built from Old Norse sources — and its argument sits in chapters six and seven. English summaries turn this into “a thesis on Old Norse”, which is not the same thing. In 1949 she and her mother managed, with the help of the Lutheran World Federation, to resettle from Germany to the United States.

Jaan Ross in Sirp: Ilse Lehiste esimesest doktoriväitekirjast ja sellega seonduvast (25 March 2022) · Estonian Wikipedia: Balti Ülikool (CC BY-SA 4.0, adapted here) · English Wikipedia: Baltic University (CC BY-SA 4.0, adapted here) · Aimar Altosaar in Postimees: Balti Ülikool – 80 aasta tagune ime varemeteväljal (16 March 2026) · German Wikipedia: Emil Wolff (Anglist) (CC BY-SA 4.0)

1949: with the help of the Lutheran World Federation, mother and daughter reached the United States. Their first home, Jaan Ross writes, was Tacoma, near Seattle — in the English-language remembrances simply “a small town south of Seattle”. The first job was washing dishes. The second was playing accompanist in a dance studio — the one year at the Tallinn Conservatory paying for itself. The third was teaching German: one year as associate professor of modern languages at Kansas Wesleyan, 1950–51, and then five at the Detroit Institute of Technology, 1951–56.

She left Detroit in order to take a second doctorate. It came from the University of Michigan in 1959: a PhD in linguistics, eleven years after the first, in another country and another subject. The dissertation, “An Acoustic-Phonetic Study of Internal Open Juncture”, asked how a listener hears the boundary between words — in the laboratory rather than on paper. It was published in 1960 as a supplement to the journal Phonetica.

She did not leave Ann Arbor with the degree. From 1959 to 1963 she worked as a research associate with Gordon E. Peterson at Michigan’s Communication Sciences Laboratory, and out of it came a run of studies on vowel duration, intrinsic fundamental frequency and amplitude. “Duration of Syllable Nuclei in English” (Peterson and Lehiste, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 32, 1960, pp. 693–703) measured 1 263 consonant-nucleus-consonant words spoken by one speaker in one identical frame sentence. And their 1961 study of diphthongs and glides set out explicit acoustic criteria for where one speech segment ends and the next begins — criteria that, Keith Johnson writes in his obituary, “are still cited as a standard today”.

And in the middle of all that, in 1960, the Estonian paper appeared. “Segmental and syllabic quantity in Estonian”, sixty-two pages in the volume American Studies in Uralic Linguistics, Bloomington — sixteen years after she left, and the same year as the Michigan dissertation. Estonian was not her job. By her own account the phonetic study of Estonian was not among the tasks she had been given; from 1960 onwards her publications nevertheless contain a great many conclusions about Estonian phonetics. The next chapter is that one paper.

Jaan Ross in Sirp: Ilse Lehiste esimesest doktoriväitekirjast ja sellega seonduvast (25 March 2022) · Keith Johnson: Ilse Lehiste. The obituary’s open version, UC Berkeley PhonLab Annual Report 7 (2011) · Zita McRobbie-Utasi: Ilse Lehiste (1922–2010). The significance of empirical evidence in linguistics (FUSAC) (CC BY 3.0) · Mary E. Beckman and Linda Shockey: In memoriam Ilse Lehiste. Journal of the IPA 41 (1), 2011 · Ilse Lehiste, with Mary Beckman, Robert A. Fox and Keith Johnson: History of Phonetics at Ohio State · Jaan Ross, Pire Teras, Eva Liina Asu et al.: Tänapäeva eesti kirjakeele uurimine. Foneetika (Emakeele Seltsi aastaraamat 48, 2002)

In 1963 she came from Michigan to The Ohio State University as associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Linguistics. Which is to say she arrived before there was a linguistics department to arrive at. A Division of Linguistics had been created in 1962 under William S-Y. Wang; in its first years it had three full-time faculty — Wang, Lehiste and Charles Fillmore. The doctoral programme came into effect at the start of the 1965–66 academic year.

She was a founding member of the department and its first chair — and here Ohio State’s own pages disagree with each other. The university’s research profile says the department was founded in 1967; the department’s memorial page and MIT Press’s author note in her 1986 book say 1965. The same goes for the chairing: the catalogue record of the 1987 Festschrift gives two terms, 1967–71 and 1985–87; the department’s history of phonetics gives three — 1965–71, acting chair in 1984–85, and chair again 1985–87. Either way she was at the head of it at both ends. And she established the phonetics laboratory, equipped from the first for research in acoustic phonetics.

The books. “Readings in Acoustic Phonetics” (MIT Press, 1967) is a collection she edited of the founding papers of acoustic phonetics — on vowels, consonants and prosody; it was, in Keith Johnson’s words, “the standard primer for a quarter of a century”. “Suprasegmentals” (MIT Press, 15 March 1970, 194 pages) is a monograph on quantity, pitch and stress — the features that reach over more than one sound — and on the work they do in a language; the line most often quoted from it, from page vi, is the warning that a phonologist ignores phonetics at his own peril. And with Pavle Ivić, “Word and Sentence Prosody in Serbocroatian” (MIT Press, 1986).

In 1970 she directed the Linguistic Society of America’s summer Linguistic Institute at Columbus and taught a course there herself, on suprasegmentals — the subject of the book she published that same year. In 1980 she was President of the Linguistic Society of America, and in the same year received one of Ohio State’s first Distinguished Research Awards. The university named her both Distinguished University Professor and Distinguished Scholar. Altogether more than twenty books stand in her name, about two hundred articles and a hundred reviews. She retired in 1987; her colleagues marked it with a Festschrift, issued as the department’s Working Papers in Linguistics No. 35 and edited by Brian D. Joseph and Arnold M. Zwicky.

Ohio State Linguistics: Remembering Ilse Lehiste — the eulogies of Craige Roberts and Jaan Ross, and colleagues’ tributes · Ohio State: Ilse Lehiste, research profile · Ilse Lehiste, with Mary Beckman, Robert A. Fox and Keith Johnson: History of Phonetics at Ohio State · Ohio State Linguistics newsletter, spring 2015: 50 Years of Ohio State Linguistics · Marjorie K. M. Chan, Ohio State: Program History · MIT Press: Suprasegmentals (1970) · MIT Press: Readings in Acoustic Phonetics (1967) · Keith Johnson: Ilse Lehiste. The obituary’s open version, UC Berkeley PhonLab Annual Report 7 (2011) · Zita McRobbie-Utasi: Ilse Lehiste (1922–2010). The significance of empirical evidence in linguistics (FUSAC) (CC BY 3.0)

The congress was organised by what was then the Institute of Language and Literature, and had close to a thousand participants. It brought the world of phonetics to the city she had left forty-three years earlier on half an hour’s notice — and brought it there at a time when the country she had left did not yet exist again.

The recognitions came in order. Honorary doctorates: the University of Essex in 1977, the University of Lund in 1982, the University of Tartu in 1989 — two years before independence was restored, from the university she had entered in 1942 and left in 1944 without a degree — and The Ohio State University in 1999, at the autumn commencement on 10 December, one of five. Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990. Foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters in 1998. Foreign member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences on 23 April 2008, at eighty-six. The Order of the White Star, third class, in 2001. And in 2009, at eighty-seven, the Ferdinand Johann Wiedemann Language Award — laureates plant a named tree in the language grove at Väike-Maarja, and hers stands there.

In 2001, with Jaan Ross, came “The Temporal Structure of Estonian Runic Songs” (Walter de Gruyter, 214 pp) — a musicologist’s and a linguist’s joint reading of archival recordings made mostly in the first half of the twentieth century, tracing how the metre and the language’s own quantities work against each other. Back to the oldest Estonian there is, from the far end of a career.

Why she did it she was asked in a Sirp interview on 8 May 2009. She answered that Estonia was missing from the map at the time, and that the more was known about Estonians the harder it would be to pass over them in silence. In the same conversation she said of learning languages, in our translation: “Rules are for teaching dead languages; living languages are learned in society, where you have to make yourself understood.” She died on Christmas Day, 25 December 2010, at eighty-eight. Ohio State held a memorial symposium on 11 and 12 November 2011 and administers a fund in her name that makes research awards to graduate students. On 17 March 2022 the Mother Tongue Society and the Estonian Academy of Sciences held a meeting in Tartu called “Ilse Lehiste 100”.

Jaan Ross, Pire Teras, Eva Liina Asu et al.: Tänapäeva eesti kirjakeele uurimine. Foneetika (Emakeele Seltsi aastaraamat 48, 2002) · Sirp: Elavaid keeli õpitakse ühiskonnas (8 May 2009), the conversation written up by Maris Johannes · Ross & Lehiste: The Temporal Structure of Estonian Runic Songs · Eesti Teaduste Akadeemia aastaraamat 2008