Roy Miller

Roy Andrew Miller was long a student of languages. His early work (ca. 1956) was with Tibetan, and in 1969 he wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica entry, The Tibeto-Burman Languages of South Asia. Prof. Miller later concentrated his efforts on Japanese, for example, The Japanese Language (1967). Although many of his early works are out of print, Tuttle Publishing keeps A Japanese Reader (1963) in print. In 1971, he proposed linking Japanese with the Altaic group of languages (Japanese and the other Altaic Languages). He later broadened his scope by linking Korean both to Japanese and Altaic, most recently in Languages and History: Japanese, Korean, and Altaic (1996). During the 1960s he was professor of Japanese at Yale University; one of his students, Norman H. Tilman established a scholarship in 1996 in Miller's honor (Yale News Release, 18 Jul 1996). Prof. Miller subsequently taught at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was professor emeritus of Japanese. Although the exact dates of this teaching career are not clear as of this writing (Apr 2005), he did end his duties at the University of Washington in December of 1989, after which he went to Europe (mainly Germany and Scandinavia). Lectures there resulted in his book Languages and History, mentioned above. The only other recent book-length treatment of his theories is in Language and Literature, a festschrift edited by Karl Menges and Nelly Naumann on the occasion of Prof. Miller's 75th birthday, which is listed on Amazon.com.de without a date; since it cannot be shipped to Taiwan (where I currently live), I will not be able to review it until July 2005. --61.219.36.130 03:15, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)