Biography
Martin was born in Pittsburg, Kansas on 29 January 1924, and grew up in Emporia, Kansas. During World War II he was trained as a Japanese Language Officer, and was stationed in Japan at the end of the war.
After the war, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in Oriental Languages. He graduated in 1947, but stayed on at Berkeley to study for a Masters degree in linguistics under Chao Yuen Ren, which he completed in 1949. He then went to Yale University to study for a PhD in Japanese Linguistics under Bernard Bloch. He completed his dissertation on Japanese morphophonemics in 1950 (published as a monograph by the Linguistic Society of America the following year), and was immediately offered a position at Yale University, where he remained until his retirement in 1994. He was made professor of Far Eastern Linguistics in 1962, and chaired both the Department of East and South Asian Languages and the Department of Linguistics. He also served as director of undergraduate studies in linguistics and director of graduate studies in East Asian languages and literatures. He was an executive fellow of Timothy Dwight College.
After Martin retired from Yale University, he moved to Washington state, near where his wife Nancy Rendell Martin had grown up in Vancouver, B.C., and close to Portland, Oregon, where his daughter Norah Martin teaches philosophy. During his retirement, Martin continued research on a variety of linguistic topics, notably Middle Korean.
In 1994, Martin was awarded the Korean government's Presidential Medal of Honor for Distinguished Cultural Contributions.
Read more about this topic: Samuel Martin (linguist)
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