Elmer Antonsen

Elmer H. Antonsen was a distinguished linguist and Germanic philologist who served as Professor Emeritus of Germanic Languages and Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Born on November 17, 1929, in Glens Falls, New York, he earned his B.A. from Union College in Schenectady, New York, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His doctoral thesis, "The Investigation of I-Mutation in the Germanic Languages," was completed under the supervision of Ernst Alfred Philippson. Antonsen also received a Fulbright Scholarship for advanced studies at the University of Vienna. Prior to his long tenure at UIUC, where he joined in 1967 and was promoted to full professor in 1970, he taught at Northwestern University and the University of Iowa. He held significant administrative roles, including Head of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures from 1973 to 1982 and Head of the Department of Linguistics from 1992 to 1996. Additionally, he was a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1972-1973 and at the University of Göttingen in 1988. Antonsen retired in 1996, after which he was granted emeritus status.

Antonsen's scholarly work centered on runology, Germanic linguistics, and German phonology. He was recognized as one of North America's leading authorities on runic inscriptions. His major publications include A Concise Grammar of the Older Runic Inscriptions (1975), Runes and Germanic Linguistics (2002), and Elements of German: Phonology and Morphology (2007). He also edited several influential volumes, such as German Linguistics II: Papers from the Second Symposium on Germanic Linguistics (1988, with Hans Henrich Hock), The Grimm Brothers and the Germanic Past (1990, with James W. Marchand and Ladislav Zgusta), and Stæfcræft: Studies in Germanic Linguistics (1991, with Hans Henrich Hock). As former managing editor of the journal Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, Antonsen made substantial contributions to linguistic scholarship. He was a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters in Trondheim, Norway, and actively participated in academic societies related to his field. A polyglot fluent in English, German, French, Russian, Danish, and Norwegian, Antonsen's research advanced the understanding of early Germanic languages and runic epigraphy.