Michael David Fortescue (born 8 August 1946, Thornbury[1]) is a British-born[2] linguist specializing in Arctic and native North American languages, including Kalaallisut, Inuktun, Chukchi and Nitinaht.
Fortescue is known for his reconstructions of the Eskaleut, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Nivkh, and Wakashan proto-languages.
As a young teenager, Michael Fortescue and his family moved to California where he went to La Jolla High School 1956-1959.[1][3] He finished school at Abingdon School in 1963.[4] In 1966, he received a B.A. with "Honours with great Distinction" in Slavic languages and literatures from University of California, Berkeley, where he then taught Russian 1968-1970 and finished an M.A. in Slavic languages and literatures. In the years 1971-1975 he taught English for the International Language Centre in Osaka and the University of Aix/Marseille.[3] He took a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh 1975-1978[5] with the thesis Procedural discourse generation model for 'Twenty Questions'.[6] With a Danish scholarship, he visited University of Copenhagen and did fieldwork in Greenland in 1978-79, and this research became supported from the Danish Research Council for the Humanities in the period 1979-1982. In 1984, he became associate professor in eskimology at the University of Copenhagen, and in 1989 docent.[3] He became professor in linguistics in 1999, and retired in 2011.[2]
On the occasion of his retirement in 2011, a special issue in the journal Grønland was published in 2012 as a festschrift. After retiring, he moved to England,[1] where he was elected an associate of St Hugh's College.[7] An edited book was published as a festschrift in his honour in 2017.[8] In 2019, he was elected to Academia Europaea.[7]
He was chairman of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen 2005-2011.[2]
His Comparative Eskimo Dictionary, co-authored with Steven Jacobson and Lawrence Kaplan,[9] is the standard work in its area, as is his Comparative Chukotko-Kamchatkan Dictionary.[10] In his book Pattern and Process,[11] Fortescue explores the possibilities of a linguistic theory based on the philosophical theories of Alfred North Whitehead.[12][13][better source needed]
A more complete listing is available in the Festschrift in his honor.[8]
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