In Memoriam: Otto Christian Dahl, 1903-1995

Author(s): Robert Blust

Source: Oceanic Linguistics, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Jun., 1996), pp. 1-5
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
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 IN MEMORIAM:
OTTO CHRISTIAN DAHL, 1903-1995

On November I I, 1995, following an illness of several months, Otto Christi

Dahl died peacefully at his home in Stavanger, Norway. With his passing w
have lost the undisputed dean of Malagasy linguistics and one of the leadin
modern figures in the broader field of Austronesian comparative linguistics.
Because his five children arranged the publication of a festschrift for the
father on his ninetieth birthday, the task of writing an obituary has been mad
somewhat easier. For personal details I have drawn heavily from the sketch
Dahl's life in that volume (0yvind Dahl I993), adding commentary on h
scholarly contributions from my own knowledge.
Dahl was born in Namsos, in the north of Norway, on July 15, 1903, th
youngest of six children. Although his father was a bookbinder and merchan
it is reported that the family often provided accommodations for "preacher
and missionaries." As a result of these contacts and of his mother's strong inter
est in missionary work, he felt a missionary vocation early in life-one th
moreover, was destined specifically for Madagascar. According to the accoun
provided by his children, in 1908 the young Otto was deeply impressed by O
Aarnes, a visitor to the Dahl home who had served as a missionary in Wes
Madagascar. Few of us can trace the roots of our professional lives to an exp
rience at so tender an age. It is perhaps a sign of Dahl's remarkable characte
and determination that his last professional paper, "Predicate, subject, and
topic in Malagasy," delivered at the Seventh International Conference on
Austronesian Linguistics 86 years later, can be seen as a continuation of th
dreams of his childhood.
From the time he was ordained as a missionary minister by the Norwegian
Missionary Society in 1927 until the late I950os, Dahl's life oscillated between
periods of residence in Madagascar (1929-1935, 1937-1946, 1952-1957) and
periods of residence in Norway. In April 1929, in Paris enroute to his first as-
signment in Madagascar, he married Mathilde Petersen. Only eighteen months
later, she died of fever, shortly after the birth of their son. Three years later Dahl
married Maria Nome, who had gone to Madagascar as a midwife. They had four
children, and their life together lasted 58 years, until her death in December,
I991.

In Madagascar on his first assignment, Dahl administered tw

arid western plains, and within I2 months he had learned
dialect, as well as Merina, the language of the capital and l

Oceanic Linguistics, Volume 35, no. I (June I996)

? by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved.

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 OCEANIC LINGUISTICS, VOL. 35, NO. I

Madagascar as a whole. At this time he had no linguistic training, but on his

return to Norway in 1935 he began to study linguistics at the University of
Oslo. In I937 he received a grant from the Institute for Comparative Research
in Human Culture that enabled him to spend several weeks in Hamburg, where
he studied briefly with Otto Dempwolff and his assistant Walther Aichele. Dahl
(I976:6ff) reports that he read the proofs of his first publication, "Le systeme
phonologique du proto-malgache" in Hamburg at the same time that Dempwolff
was reading the proofs of his study of Malagasy in volume 2 of his foundation-
laying Vergleichende Lautlehre des austronesischen Wortschatzes. From Aichele
he learned that the closest relative of Malagasy appeared to be Ma' anyan, a
little-known language of southeast Borneo, in what was then the Dutch East
Indies (now the Republic of Indonesia).
On returning to Madagascar in 1937, the Dahls found themselves cut off
from Europe by the events of the Second World War. During the war years, Dahl
taught himself Dutch, an essential tool for any scholar interested in the lan-
guages of Indonesia. Although I have not seen it stated explicitly, it seems
likely that during this period of isolation and great difficulty he was already
beginning to conceive the plan for his first and most famous book.
Following the war, Dahl resumed his studies at the University of Oslo, where
he received his doctorate in May 1952, just before departing for a third and
final period of missionary service in Madagascar. An event that was more im-
portant historically, however, took place the year before. In 1951 Dahl pub-
lished Malgache et Maanjan, a book of over 400 pages, in which he argued
persuasively that Malagasy subgroups with Ma'anyan, and so must have reached
Madagascar by a coastal sea voyage or voyages of over 8,ooo miles. Although
this was not his first publication, it was the one that made him known to all
Austronesian specialists, and to many educated Malagasy. Today Dahl's thesis
that Madagascar was settled from southeast Borneo is all but universally ac-
cepted by linguists, with scholarly disagreements being confined largely to
details of timing and of the role of Sriwijayan Malays in the migration (Adelaar
I989, Dahl I991).
On their return to Norway in 1957, the Dahls moved to Oslo, and in that year
Otto Dahl was elected to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The
following year he was elected field secretary of the Norwegian Missionary So-
ciety. Although this honor effectively prevented him from returning to linguis-
tic research for most of the following decade, his missionary duties did take
him to Taiwan in 1960, where he visited a Paiwan village and collected some
limited data on the language. This visit, in which he was able to see from first-
hand experience that the connections of Malagasy extend well beyond Indo-
nesia, evidently marked the beginning of Dahl' s wider interest in Austronesian
comparative linguistics.
From 1967 through 1974, a fellowship approved by the Norwegian parlia-
ment permitted Dahl to concentrate on full-time research. During this time he

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IN MEMORIAM: OTTO CHRISTIAN DAHL, 1903-I995 3

sat on the board of the Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies and got to know
its director, the late S0ren Egerod. The major product of this second period of
uninterrupted research (the first was from 1949-1952) was his book, Proto-
Austronesian, first published in I973, and reissued in a second edition in 1976.
Proto-Austronesian is not an introduction to Austronesian linguistics, as I found
when I tried to use it as a text for an introductory course on the Austronesian
language family. Rather, it is a thorough examination of the strengths and weak-
nesses, and underlying assumptions of much of the work of Otto Dempwolff and
his mid-century American interpreter, Isidore Dyen. As noted in a review of that
work, "Dahl's close attention to phonetic controls on phonological reconstruc-
tion, though sometimes carried too far, is refreshing, and he exhibits a sense of
process and system in language change which has often been missing in the
Austronesian literature" (Blust I976:235).
Dahl's missionary vocation and his many years of residence in Madagascar
had not provided opportunities for him to be in contact with many other schol-
ars concerned with the study of the Austronesian languages. Toward the end of
his research fellowship, he attended the First International Conference on Austro-
nesian Linguistics, held in Honolulu January 2-7, 1974. More than any other
event, this gathering marked his entry into the world of professional scholar-
ship, despite the fact that Malgache et Maanjan had been published nearly a
quarter of a century earlier. For the first time, Dahl met scholars from around the
world who shared his interest in Austronesian linguistics, and he began to cor-
respond with several of them. Dahl and I began an active correspondence at this
time that lasted until shortly before his death. Other such professional contacts
that he maintained throughout the remainder of his life included those with R.
David Paul Zorc, Paul Jen-kuei Li, and Shigeru Tsuchida.
In 1978 Dahl attended the Second International Conference on Austronesian
Linguistics in Canberra. As a result of this contact our friendship deepened,
and we gained a fuller appreciation of one another's work. The stimulation of
this wider circle of scholarly contacts soon bore fruit. In 1981, Dahl published
Early phonetic and phonemic changes in Austronesian, a book that extended the
theme of searching critical examination prominent in Proto-Austronesian to
more recent scholarship.
Dahl's last book, Migration from Kalimantan to Madagascar, was published
in 1991, when he was 88 years old. It, too, was a by-product of the kind of
stimulating interaction with other scholars that he was able to enjoy only rela-
tively late in life (in this case, correspondence with K. Alexander Adelaar).
During his long life, Otto Dahl received many honors. In Madagascar, he
was made Chevalier (1979), then Officier (1984), then Commandeur (1989) of
the Malagasy National Order of Chivalry, and finally, in I992, he was nomi-
nated for the second highest rank recognized by the government of the Repub-
lic of Madagascar, that of Grand Officier, an honor that was bestowed upon him
in June 1995. In Norway, in addition to the research award granted him by the

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4 OCEANIC LINGUISTICS, VOL. 35, NO. I

Norwegian parliament I967-1974, he was awarded two stipends by the Insti-

tute for Comparative Research in Human Culture, the first in 1937, and the sec-
ond from 1976-I98I. In November 1994, he received the Golden Medal of
King Harald.
Because he was primarily a missionary, Dahl rarely enjoyed opportunities
for pure research until he retired. But when these opportunities came, the re-
sults were impressive. Each of his first three books was written during a period
of supported research, and the last was written when he was far beyond the usual
age of retirement. Throughout his scholarly career, Dahl's research was focused
primarily on Malagasy, but from the age of 70 he expanded his horizons to
Austronesian comparative linguistics as a whole. Limitations of time and op-
portunity meant that Dahl' s comparative work was always based on a relatively
small sample of languages, most notably Malagasy, several of the languages of
western Indonesia, and the Formosan aboriginal languages, with which he first
came in contact during a missionary visit in I960. Like the Swiss scholar Renward
Brandstetter half a century before him, he never worked on the Oceanic mem-
bers of the large and widely distributed Austronesian family. Dahl was always
a careful and a patient scholar, but that did not prevent him from taking up bold
proposals when he felt the evidence supported his position. The demonstration
that the Malagasy migration must have been from southeast Borneo is one of
the great triumphs of the Comparative Method in solving problems of linguis-
tic prehistory, and it alone ensures Dahl a permanent place among the major
scholars in the history of the Austronesian field.
I met Dahl only three times, at the First, Third, and Seventh International
Conferences on Austronesian Linguistics. Despite the rarity of these personal
contacts, it never seemed to me that he was far away. He was a person of great
sincerity and such profound and simple goodness that, once having met him, it
was as though a part of him was always with me. At our last meeting in Holland
in August 1994, Dahl was visibly weakened by age and illness. But his person-
ality had the same quiet radiance that I had seen in earlier years. He was de-
lighted to meet my wife, and he asked about my health and work. I sensed it
would be our last chance to talk, and made it a point to have some photos taken
with him, and to sit by his side at the final banquet. When it was over and we
parted, I wanted to say much more, but somehow could only manage "good-
bye." Years before, I had asked him for some biographical details, delicately
hinting that I would like to write about him when he was gone. He replied that
neither of us knew who would go first, but he sent some information in any case.
That was the only time I ever detected a hint of feistiness in Otto Christian Dahl,
and those of us who were fortunate to know him will remember him as much for
his gentleness of spirit as for his lasting contributions to scholarship.

ROBERT BLUST
University of Hawai'i

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IN MEMORIAM: OTTO CHRISTIAN DAHL, I903-I1995 5

REFERENCES

Adelaar, K.A. I989. Malay influence on Malagasy: linguistic and culture-his

cations. Oceanic Linguistics 28:1I-46.
Blust, Robert. 1976. Review of Dahl, Proto-Austronesian. Language 52. 1:2
Dahl, Otto Chr. 1938. Le systeme phonologique du proto-malgache. Norsk
Sprogvidenskap I o: 189-235.
. 195 I. Malgache et Maanjan: Une comparaison linguistique. Oslo:
tute.
. I976. Proto-Austronesian, 2d rev. ed. Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies
Monograph Series, no. 15. London: Curzon Press.
. 198 I. Early phonetic and phonemic changes inAustronesian. Oslo: The Institute
for Comparative Research in Human Culture.
. I991 . Migration from Kalimantan to Madagascar. Oslo: The Institute for Com-
parative Research in Human Culture.
Dahl, 0yvind, ed. 1991. Language-a doorway between human cultures: Tributes to Dr.
Otto Chr. Dahl on his ninetieth birthday. Oslo: Novus.
Dempwolff, Otto. 1934-I 938. Vergleichende Lautlehre des austronesischen Wortschatzes.
3 vols. Berlin: Reimer.

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