Forget-me-not: Japanese historical linguistics in memory of Prof. Dr. Elisabeth De Boer

On 22 August 2023, our dear colleague Elisabeth de Boer sadly died at the age of 57, cutting short a promising career in Japanese Historical Linguistics.

Elisabeth was a respected teacher of Japanese and linguistics at the Universities of Leiden and Bochum. Her researched challenged several so-called teisetsu or ‘accepted opinions’ encountered in the field. Among others, Elisabeth showed that Japanese is better described as a restricted tone language than as a pitch-accent language; that Kyōto-type dialects have been less conservative than dialects to their east and west and that the commonly accepted binary tree structure of Japonic is in need of revision. Moreover, Elisabeth did not shy away from interdisciplinary approaches, integrating linguistic evidence with archaeological and genetic findings to illuminate ancient population movements across the Japanese Islands.

In this workshop, several colleagues will build on Elisabeth’s research and teaching in Japanese historical linguistics. Special attention will be paid to the posthumous appearance of her (2024) book on Using Tonal Data to Recover Japanese Language History. We cordially invite colleagues and all who knew her well to take a moment to reflect on Elisabeth as a scientist and a person.