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Thomas Sebeok

January 01, 1970

The native form of this personal name is Sebők Tamás. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Thomas Albert Sebeok (Hungarian: Sebők Tamás, pronounced [ˈʃɛbøːk ˈtɒmaːʃ]; November 9, 1920 – December 21, 2001) was a Hungarian-born American polymath,[1] semiotician, and linguist.[2][3][4][5][6] As one of the founders of the biosemiotics field, he studied non-human and cross-species signaling and communication.[7] He is also known for his work in the development of long-time nuclear waste warning messages, in which he worked with the Human Interference Task Force (established 1981) to create methods for keeping the inhabitants of Earth away from buried nuclear waste that will still be hazardous 10,000 or more years in the future.[8]

Thomas Sebeok
Sebeok giving a lecture in Tartu
Born
Sebők Tamás

(1920-11-09)November 9, 1920
Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary
DiedDecember 21, 2001(2001-12-21) (aged 81)
Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.
Academic background
Education
Academic work
InstitutionsIndiana University
Main interests
Dezső Sebeok and Vera Perlmann and their son Thomas (c. 1924)

Early life and education edit

Thomas Sebeok was born on November 9, 1920, in Budapest, Hungary. He attended secondary school at the famous Fasori Gimnázium, which educated notables such as John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner. After a brief stint at Cambridge University (Magdalene College) in England, he moved to the United States at the age of 17 and became a naturalized citizen in 1944.[9] Sebeok earned a bachelor's degree in 1941 at the University of Chicago. He earned a master's degree in anthropological linguistics, under the external guidance of Roman Jakobson, at Princeton University in 1943 and, in 1945, a doctorate at Princeton University; his dissertation was titled Finnish and Hungarian case systems: their form and function.[10]

Academic work edit

In 1943, Sebeok started work at Indiana University in Bloomington, assisting the Amerindianist Carl Voegelin in managing the country's largest Army Specialized Training Program in foreign languages. He then created the university's department of Uralic and Altaic Studies, covering the languages of Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia. He was also the chair of the university's Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies.

As a professor at Indiana University, Sebeok studied both human and non-human systems of signaling and communication, as well as the philosophy of mind.[11] He was among the founders of biosemiotics, and coined the term "zoosemiotics" in 1963 to describe the development of signals and signs by non-human animal species.[12] He also continued his work as a linguist, publishing several articles and books analyzing aspects of the Mari language (referring to it by the name "Cheremis"). His transdisciplinary work and professional collaborations spanned the fields of anthropology, biology, folklore studies, linguistics, psychology, and semiotics.[11]

Sebeok was the editor-in-chief of the journal Semiotica, the leading periodical in the field, from its establishing in 1969 until 2001.[13] He was also the editor of several book series and encyclopedias, including Approaches to Semiotics (over 100 volumes), Current Trends in Linguistics, and the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics.[11]

In the early 1980s, Sebeok composed a report for the US Office of Nuclear Waste Management titled Communication Measures To Bridge Ten Millennia,[14] discussing solutions to the problem of nuclear semiotics, a system of signs aimed at warning future civilizations from entering geographic areas contaminated by nuclear waste.[15] The report proposed a "folkloric relay system" and the establishment of an "atomic priesthood" of physicists, anthropologists, and semioticians to create and preserve a common cultural narrative of the hazardous nature of nuclear waste sites.[16]

In addition to his academic work, Sebeok organized hundreds of international conferences and institutes, held leadership roles in organizations such as the Linguistic Society of America, International Association for Semiotic Studies, Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and the Semiotic Society of America, and supported the creation of linguistic and semiotics teaching programs and scholarly associations throughout the world.[1]

Sebeok's personal library on semiotics, comprising more than 4,000 volumes of books and 700 journals, is preserved at the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu in Estonia.[17] His correspondence and research files are held by the Indiana University Archives.[10]

Personal life edit

Sebeok married Mary Eleanor Lawton (1912–2005) in 1947. They had one child, Veronica C. Wald, and later divorced. Sebeok married Donna Jean Umiker (born 1946, now D. Jean Umiker-Sebeok), a fellow semiotic scholar and his frequent collaborator and co-author, in 1973, and they had two children, Jessica A. Sebeok and Erica L. Sebeok. Sebeok retired from Indiana University in 1991, but he contributed to the field of semiotics until his death in 2001.[10]

Sebeok Fellow Award edit

The Sebeok Fellow Award "recognizes outstanding contributions to the development of the doctrine of signs" and is the highest honor given by the Semiotic Society of America. It is awarded every 2 to 4 years. Recipients have included David Savan (1992), John Deely (1993), Paul Bouissac (1996), Jesper Hoffmeyer (2000), Kalevi Kull (2003), Floyd Merrell (2005), Susan Petrilli (2008), Irmengard Rauch (2011), Paul Cobley (2014), Vincent Colapietro (2018), Nathan Houser (2019), Marcel Danesi (2020).[11][18]

Selected English publications edit

  • Sebeok, Thomas A. (1942). "An Examination of the Austroasiatic Language Family". Language. 18 (3): 206–217. doi:10.2307/409554. JSTOR 409554.
  • Bonfante, G.; Sebeok, Thomas A. (1944). "Linguistics and the Age and Area Hypothesis". American Anthropologist. 46 (3): 382–386. doi:10.1525/aa.1944.46.3.02a00100. JSTOR 663436.
  • Gunda, Béla; Sebeok, Thomas A. (1947). "Work and Cult among the Hungarian Peasants". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. 3 (2): 147–163. doi:10.1086/soutjanth.3.2.3628730. JSTOR 3628730. S2CID 147181353.
  • Sebeok, Thomas A.; Baughman, Ernest W. (1949). "A New Collection of Hungarian Folktales". Hoosier Folklore. 8 (2/3): 50–66. JSTOR 27649978.
  • Sebeok, Thomas A.; Lane, Evelyn (1949). "The Cheremis Folksong: A Soviet Viewpoint". The Slavonic and East European Review. 28 (70): 139–151. JSTOR 4204100.
  • Sebeok, Thomas A. (1959). "Folksong Viewed as Code and Message. A Cheremis Sonnet". Anthropos. 54 (1/2): 141–153. JSTOR 40454330.
  • Sebeok, Thomas A., ed. Style in Language. New York and London: The Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, 1960. ISBN 9780262190077
  • Sebeok, Thomas A. (1965). "Animal Communication". Science. 147 (3661): 1006–1014. Bibcode:1965Sci...147.1006S. doi:10.1126/science.147.3661.1006. JSTOR 1715212. PMID 14245775. S2CID 22727597.
  • Sebeok, Thomas A. (1967). "Aspects of Animal Communication: The Bees and Porpoises". Etc: A Review of General Semantics. 24 (1): 59–83. JSTOR 42574310.
  • Sebeok, Thomas A. (1968). ""Zoosemiotics"". American Speech. 43 (2): 142–144. doi:10.2307/454548. JSTOR 454548.
  • Umiker-Sebeok, Jean; Sebeok, Thomas A. (1981). "Clever Hans and Smart Simians: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and Kindred Methodological Pitfalls". Anthropos. 76 (1/2): 89–165. JSTOR 40460295.
  • Sebeok, Thomas A, Donna J. Umiker-Sebeok, and Adam Kendon. Nonverbal Communication, Interaction, and Gesture: Selections from Semiotica. The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1981.
  • Eco, Umberto; Sebeok, Thomas A., eds. (1984). The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Bloomington, IN: History Workshop, Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-35235-4., 236 pages. Ten essays on methods of abductive inference in Poe's Dupin, Doyle's Holmes, Peirce and many others.
  • Sebeok, Thomas A, Marcia E. Erickson, Umberto Eco, V V. Ivanov, and Mônica Rector. Carnival! Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1984.
  • Sebeok, Thomas A, Donna J. Umiker-Sebeok, and Evan P. Young. The Semiotic Web, 1989. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990.
  • Sebeok, Thomas A, and Marcel Danesi. The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis, 2000.
  • Sebeok, Thomas A. Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics. Toronto, Ont: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

References edit

  1. ^ a b Cobley, Paul; Deely, John; Kull, Kalevi; Petrilli, Susan (eds.) (2011). Semiotics Continues to Astonish: Thomas A. Sebeok and the Doctrine of Signs. (Semiotics, Communication and Cognition 7.) Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
  2. ^ Hoffmeyer, Jesper (2002). Obituary: Thomas A. Sebeok. Sign Systems Studies 30(1): 383–385.
  3. ^ McDowell, J. H. (2003). Thomas A. Sebeok (1920-2001). Journal of American Folklore.
  4. ^ Marcel Danesi and Albert Valdman (2004). Thomas A. Sebeok. Language. Vol. 80, No. 2, pp. 312-317
  5. ^ Brier S. (2003). Thomas Sebeok: Mister (Bio)semiotics. An obituary for Thomas A. Sebeok. Cybernetics & Human Knowing 10(1): 102-105(4)
  6. ^ Anderson, Myrdene (2003). "Thomas Albert Sebeok (1920-2001)". American Anthropologist. 105: 228–231. doi:10.1525/aa.2003.105.1.228.
  7. ^ Kull, Kalevi (2003). Thomas A. Sebeok and biology: Building biosemiotics. Cybernetics and Human Knowing 10(1): 47–60.
  8. ^ "Pandora's Box: How and Why to Communicate 10,000 Years into the Future". www.mat.ucsb.edu.
  9. ^ "Thomas Sebeok, 81; Linguist Debunked Theory About Apes". Los Angeles Times. January 7, 2002. Retrieved April 12, 2020.
  10. ^ a b c "Thomas Sebeok papers, 1940-2001 and undated; A Guide to his Papers at the Indiana University Archives". Retrieved April 12, 2020.
  11. ^ a b c d "Sebeok Fellow Award – Semiotic Society of America". Retrieved November 11, 2019.
  12. ^ Kull, Kalevi 2014. Zoosemiotics is the study of animal forms of knowing. Semiotica 198: 47–60.
  13. ^ Watt, W. (2006). Thomas A. Sebeok: In memoriam Semiotica, Issue, 1-525. Retrieved 2 Mar. 2012, from doi:10.1515/semi.2003.091
  14. ^ Thomas A. Sebeok (1984). Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia. Columbus, Ohio: Battelle Memorial Institute, Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation. doi:10.2172/6705990. OSTI 6705990.
  15. ^ Umberto Eco (1995). The search for the perfect language. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 176–177. ISBN 0-631-17465-6.
  16. ^ Lapidos, Juliet (November 16, 2009). "Atomic priesthoods, thorn landscapes, and Munchian pictograms". Slate. Retrieved September 19, 2009.
  17. ^ Gift from an illustrious semiotician enriches Tartu University. Postimees, 10-10-2011. (in Estonian)
  18. ^ 'Introducing the Tenth and Eleventh SSA Sebeok Fellows: Vincent Colapietro and Nathan Houser', The American Journal of Semiotics, Volume 36, Issue 1/2, 2020 (Sebeok Fellows Issue: Vincent Colapietro and Nathan Houser).

External links edit

  • Thomas Sebeok papers, 1940-2001 and undated at the Indiana University Archives.
  • Indiana University School of Library and Information Science Press Release: "Thomas A. Sebeok, Senior Fellow at SLIS, Passes On 2012-02-04 at the Wayback Machine
  • "The Estonian Connection" by Thomas A. Sebeok 2007-06-10 at the Wayback Machine

January 01, 1970
thomas, sebeok, native, form, this, personal, name, sebők, tamás, this, article, uses, western, name, order, when, mentioning, individuals, thomas, albert, sebeok, hungarian, sebők, tamás, pronounced, ˈʃɛbøːk, ˈtɒmaːʃ, november, 1920, december, 2001, hungarian. The native form of this personal name is Sebok Tamas This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals Thomas Albert Sebeok Hungarian Sebok Tamas pronounced ˈʃɛboːk ˈtɒmaːʃ November 9 1920 December 21 2001 was a Hungarian born American polymath 1 semiotician and linguist 2 3 4 5 6 As one of the founders of the biosemiotics field he studied non human and cross species signaling and communication 7 He is also known for his work in the development of long time nuclear waste warning messages in which he worked with the Human Interference Task Force established 1981 to create methods for keeping the inhabitants of Earth away from buried nuclear waste that will still be hazardous 10 000 or more years in the future 8 Thomas SebeokSebeok giving a lecture in TartuBornSebok Tamas 1920 11 09 November 9 1920Budapest Kingdom of HungaryDiedDecember 21 2001 2001 12 21 aged 81 Bloomington Indiana U S Academic backgroundEducationUniversity of ChicagoPrinceton UniversityAcademic workInstitutionsIndiana UniversityMain interestsSemiotics biosemiotics zoosemiotics Linguistics Dezso Sebeok and Vera Perlmann and their son Thomas c 1924 Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Academic work 3 Personal life 4 Sebeok Fellow Award 5 Selected English publications 6 References 7 External linksEarly life and education editThomas Sebeok was born on November 9 1920 in Budapest Hungary He attended secondary school at the famous Fasori Gimnazium which educated notables such as John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner After a brief stint at Cambridge University Magdalene College in England he moved to the United States at the age of 17 and became a naturalized citizen in 1944 9 Sebeok earned a bachelor s degree in 1941 at the University of Chicago He earned a master s degree in anthropological linguistics under the external guidance of Roman Jakobson at Princeton University in 1943 and in 1945 a doctorate at Princeton University his dissertation was titled Finnish and Hungarian case systems their form and function 10 Academic work editIn 1943 Sebeok started work at Indiana University in Bloomington assisting the Amerindianist Carl Voegelin in managing the country s largest Army Specialized Training Program in foreign languages He then created the university s department of Uralic and Altaic Studies covering the languages of Eastern Europe Russia and Asia He was also the chair of the university s Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies As a professor at Indiana University Sebeok studied both human and non human systems of signaling and communication as well as the philosophy of mind 11 He was among the founders of biosemiotics and coined the term zoosemiotics in 1963 to describe the development of signals and signs by non human animal species 12 He also continued his work as a linguist publishing several articles and books analyzing aspects of the Mari language referring to it by the name Cheremis His transdisciplinary work and professional collaborations spanned the fields of anthropology biology folklore studies linguistics psychology and semiotics 11 Sebeok was the editor in chief of the journal Semiotica the leading periodical in the field from its establishing in 1969 until 2001 13 He was also the editor of several book series and encyclopedias including Approaches to Semiotics over 100 volumes Current Trends in Linguistics and the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics 11 In the early 1980s Sebeok composed a report for the US Office of Nuclear Waste Management titled Communication Measures To Bridge Ten Millennia 14 discussing solutions to the problem of nuclear semiotics a system of signs aimed at warning future civilizations from entering geographic areas contaminated by nuclear waste 15 The report proposed a folkloric relay system and the establishment of an atomic priesthood of physicists anthropologists and semioticians to create and preserve a common cultural narrative of the hazardous nature of nuclear waste sites 16 In addition to his academic work Sebeok organized hundreds of international conferences and institutes held leadership roles in organizations such as the Linguistic Society of America International Association for Semiotic Studies Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the Semiotic Society of America and supported the creation of linguistic and semiotics teaching programs and scholarly associations throughout the world 1 Sebeok s personal library on semiotics comprising more than 4 000 volumes of books and 700 journals is preserved at the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu in Estonia 17 His correspondence and research files are held by the Indiana University Archives 10 Personal life editSebeok married Mary Eleanor Lawton 1912 2005 in 1947 They had one child Veronica C Wald and later divorced Sebeok married Donna Jean Umiker born 1946 now D Jean Umiker Sebeok a fellow semiotic scholar and his frequent collaborator and co author in 1973 and they had two children Jessica A Sebeok and Erica L Sebeok Sebeok retired from Indiana University in 1991 but he contributed to the field of semiotics until his death in 2001 10 Sebeok Fellow Award editThe Sebeok Fellow Award recognizes outstanding contributions to the development of the doctrine of signs and is the highest honor given by the Semiotic Society of America It is awarded every 2 to 4 years Recipients have included David Savan 1992 John Deely 1993 Paul Bouissac 1996 Jesper Hoffmeyer 2000 Kalevi Kull 2003 Floyd Merrell 2005 Susan Petrilli 2008 Irmengard Rauch 2011 Paul Cobley 2014 Vincent Colapietro 2018 Nathan Houser 2019 Marcel Danesi 2020 11 18 Selected English publications editSebeok Thomas A 1942 An Examination of the Austroasiatic Language Family Language 18 3 206 217 doi 10 2307 409554 JSTOR 409554 Bonfante G Sebeok Thomas A 1944 Linguistics and the Age and Area Hypothesis American Anthropologist 46 3 382 386 doi 10 1525 aa 1944 46 3 02a00100 JSTOR 663436 Gunda Bela Sebeok Thomas A 1947 Work and Cult among the Hungarian Peasants Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 3 2 147 163 doi 10 1086 soutjanth 3 2 3628730 JSTOR 3628730 S2CID 147181353 Sebeok Thomas A Baughman Ernest W 1949 A New Collection of Hungarian Folktales Hoosier Folklore 8 2 3 50 66 JSTOR 27649978 Sebeok Thomas A Lane Evelyn 1949 The Cheremis Folksong A Soviet Viewpoint The Slavonic and East European Review 28 70 139 151 JSTOR 4204100 Sebeok Thomas A 1959 Folksong Viewed as Code and Message A Cheremis Sonnet Anthropos 54 1 2 141 153 JSTOR 40454330 Sebeok Thomas A ed Style in Language New York and London The Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John Wiley amp Sons 1960 ISBN 9780262190077 Sebeok Thomas A 1965 Animal Communication Science 147 3661 1006 1014 Bibcode 1965Sci 147 1006S doi 10 1126 science 147 3661 1006 JSTOR 1715212 PMID 14245775 S2CID 22727597 Sebeok Thomas A 1967 Aspects of Animal Communication The Bees and Porpoises Etc A Review of General Semantics 24 1 59 83 JSTOR 42574310 Sebeok Thomas A 1968 Zoosemiotics American Speech 43 2 142 144 doi 10 2307 454548 JSTOR 454548 Umiker Sebeok Jean Sebeok Thomas A 1981 Clever Hans and Smart Simians The Self Fulfilling Prophecy and Kindred Methodological Pitfalls Anthropos 76 1 2 89 165 JSTOR 40460295 Sebeok Thomas A Donna J Umiker Sebeok and Adam Kendon Nonverbal Communication Interaction and Gesture Selections from Semiotica The Hague Mouton Publishers 1981 Eco Umberto Sebeok Thomas A eds 1984 The Sign of Three Dupin Holmes Peirce Bloomington IN History Workshop Indiana University Press ISBN 978 0 253 35235 4 236 pages Ten essays on methods of abductive inference in Poe s Dupin Doyle s Holmes Peirce and many others Sebeok Thomas A Marcia E Erickson Umberto Eco V V Ivanov and Monica Rector Carnival Berlin Mouton Publishers 1984 Sebeok Thomas A Donna J Umiker Sebeok and Evan P Young The Semiotic Web 1989 Berlin Mouton de Gruyter 1990 Sebeok Thomas A and Marcel Danesi The Forms of Meaning Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis 2000 Sebeok Thomas A Signs An Introduction to Semiotics Toronto Ont University of Toronto Press 2001 References edit a b Cobley Paul Deely John Kull Kalevi Petrilli Susan eds 2011 Semiotics Continues to Astonish Thomas A Sebeok and the Doctrine of Signs Semiotics Communication and Cognition 7 Berlin De Gruyter Mouton Hoffmeyer Jesper 2002 Obituary Thomas A Sebeok Sign Systems Studies 30 1 383 385 McDowell J H 2003 Thomas A Sebeok 1920 2001 Journal of American Folklore Marcel Danesi and Albert Valdman 2004 Thomas A Sebeok Language Vol 80 No 2 pp 312 317 Brier S 2003 Thomas Sebeok Mister Bio semiotics An obituary for Thomas A Sebeok Cybernetics amp Human Knowing 10 1 102 105 4 Anderson Myrdene 2003 Thomas Albert Sebeok 1920 2001 American Anthropologist 105 228 231 doi 10 1525 aa 2003 105 1 228 Kull Kalevi 2003 Thomas A Sebeok and biology Building biosemiotics Cybernetics and Human Knowing 10 1 47 60 Pandora s Box How and Why to Communicate 10 000 Years into the Future www mat ucsb edu Thomas Sebeok 81 Linguist Debunked Theory About Apes Los Angeles Times January 7 2002 Retrieved April 12 2020 a b c Thomas Sebeok papers 1940 2001 and undated A Guide to his Papers at the Indiana University Archives Retrieved April 12 2020 a b c d Sebeok Fellow Award Semiotic Society of America Retrieved November 11 2019 Kull Kalevi 2014 Zoosemiotics is the study of animal forms of knowing Semiotica 198 47 60 Watt W 2006 Thomas A Sebeok In memoriam Semiotica Issue 1 525 Retrieved 2 Mar 2012 from doi 10 1515 semi 2003 091 Thomas A Sebeok 1984 Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia Columbus Ohio Battelle Memorial Institute Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation doi 10 2172 6705990 OSTI 6705990 Umberto Eco 1995 The search for the perfect language Wiley Blackwell pp 176 177 ISBN 0 631 17465 6 Lapidos Juliet November 16 2009 Atomic priesthoods thorn landscapes and Munchian pictograms Slate Retrieved September 19 2009 Gift from an illustrious semiotician enriches Tartu University Postimees 10 10 2011 in Estonian Introducing the Tenth and Eleventh SSA Sebeok Fellows Vincent Colapietro and Nathan Houser The American Journal of Semiotics Volume 36 Issue 1 2 2020 Sebeok Fellows Issue Vincent Colapietro and Nathan Houser External links editThomas Sebeok papers 1940 2001 and undated at the Indiana University Archives Indiana University School of Library and Information Science Press Release Thomas A Sebeok Senior Fellow at SLIS Passes On Archived 2012 02 04 at the Wayback Machine The Estonian Connection by Thomas A Sebeok Archived 2007 06 10 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Thomas Sebeok amp oldid 1207105213, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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