Mary Haas - Work On Thai

Work On Thai

During World War II, the study and teaching of Southeast Asian languages was considered by the Allies to be important to the war effort, so under the auspices of the Army Specialized Training Program at the University of California at Berkeley, Haas developed a program to teach the Thai language. Her authoritative Thai-English Students' Dictionary, published in 1964, is still in use.

Haas was appointed to a permanent position at the University of California, Berkeley Department of Oriental Languages (an appointment she attributed to Peter A. Boodberg, whom she described as "ahead of his time in the way he treated women scholars—a scholar was a scholar in his book").

She served as President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1963. She received honorary doctorates from Northwestern University in 1975, the University of Chicago in 1976, Earlham College, 1980, and Ohio State University in 1980.

She died on May 17, 1996 in Alameda County, California, aged 86.