Necrology
Thomas Lloyd Markey '62
May. 29, 1940-Aug. 17, 2022
Thomas Lloyd Markey ’62 died on Aug. 17, 2022, in Tucson, Ariz. Born on May 29, 1940, in Dayton, Ohio, he came to Hamilton from Bowling Green (Ohio) High School where he demonstrated an enthusiasm for foreign languages. His interest in Latin, German, and French specifically foreshadowed his future career.
On the Hill he majored in classical languages and English literature, was a member of Gryphon fraternity, and participated in the Charlatans. Tom spent his junior year as a Commonwealth Fellow at University College London. During that year, he traveled to Norway where he met Inger Mette Lunaas, who shared his interest in languages and, as it happened, read and wrote in the three Scandinavian languages as well as Old Norse.
Like Mette, Tom was fascinated not just by learning to speak, write, and read in various languages, but also in studying their separate and collective histories. Two projects, one an independent study, the other his senior thesis, foretold his subsequent record of extraordinary achievement as a linguistic scholar. Working with Professor of Greek Herbert Long ’39, H’72, he translated portions of The Odyssey into English: his foundation was one summer’s residence in Greece to study the language. He compared the Ionic form of Homer’s language dating from as far back as the seventh century BCE with that of Attic forms of the language from the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, effectively analyzing the evolution of a single language. For his senior thesis he contrasted a portion of The Odyssey with one from Beowulf, juxtaposing Homer’s ancient Greek with Old English.
Prior to his graduate studies, Tom married Mette in Oslo, Norway, on Aug. 12, 1962. They moved to New Haven, Conn., where he entered Yale University’s master’s program in linguistics. A year later he transferred to the University of Chicago where he completed his master’s degree in German and Scandinavian languages in the spring of 1966, then participated in a summer linguistics institute at the University of California Los Angeles. Doctoral studies followed that fall at Uppsala University in Sweden, from which he earned his final degree in 1969. His work included a year at Peterhouse College, Cambridge University, as a research fellow and a year as a research associate for the Scandinavian Languages Project at Harvard. The title of his dissertation was “The verbs varda and bliva in Scandinavian with Special Emphasis on Swedish.” Also in 1969, Inger gave birth to their daughter, Jessica.
Tom’s academic career began at Harvard that same year, when he accepted an appointment as assistant professor of German and linguistics. In 1972, while retaining his position at Harvard, he was for a year a visiting professor of linguistics at the University of Vienna. Starting in 1973, he spent two years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, first as a visiting assistant professor and, the next year, as an assistant professor of German and linguistics.
After his first marriage to Inger ended in 1972, Tom met and later married Patricia Ann Pease. They met in Ann Arbor and she shared his interest in linguistics; in 1977, she was awarded a doctorate in the subject for her dissertation, “Tahitian French: A Study in Tense and Aspect.” Tom and Patricia had one son.
The University of Michigan was Tom’s academic home thereafter. He retired in 1987 as professor emeritus and went on to create a publishing company, Karoma Publishers, Inc., dedicated to publishing research in linguistics.
Beginning with his graduate studies and continuing throughout his career, Tom was awarded a National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship, an Icelandic Ministry of Education Fellowship, and Fulbright and Swedish-American Foundation fellowships. He was a guest lecturer in Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, among other countries.
In the course of his scholarship he published more than 150 papers, reviews, and book manuscripts. He edited three scholarly journals and was a member of a number of professional organizations both in the U.S. and in Europe. His specific area of interest concerned Indo-European languages. Drawing principally upon ancient texts found on excavated artifacts, among other primary sources, he and his colleagues worked to reconstruct the oldest form of these languages, termed Proto-Indo-European. Their ultimate purpose was to try to determine the basic components of human language.
But the languages of Europe and their ancestors did not constitute his sole linguistic interests. In 1984, he began a three-year project, underwritten by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, to oversee the Fox-English Bilingual Education Project and to initiate a program to preserve the language of the Fox Tribe of the Meskwaki Nation. Developing bilingual teaching materials for K-8 students, he conducted on-site research on the reservation in Tama, Iowa.
Beyond linguistics, Tom was regarded by many as a gifted cook who at one point set himself the goal of preparing the meal that constituted the climax of the film Babette’s Feast. He liked to hunt, fish, tell stories, and hike, including crossing the Sahara Desert on foot and otherwise by camel. He was also a raconteur whose stories were described by one friend as “endless and hilarious.”
A Hamilton classmate and roommate recalled that “what set Tom apart — in very good ways — was that he possessed a brilliant mind, coupled with wide-ranging curiosity and tremendous intellectual drive and focus. Along with this went kindness and a really neat (but sometimes quirky) sense of humor. … The world has lost a truly remarkable individual.”
Thomas L. Markey is survived by his wife, daughter, son, and former wife.
