The Evolution of Historical Linguistics: Sir Ralph Turner Memorial Lecture 9th May, 1985

Abstract

It would, of course, be possible in the case of a man such as Sir Ralph Turner to devote an entire lecture to an extended obituary. Several full obituaries have already been published, but a brief notice of some salient features of his life and career are still, perhaps, in place in a Memorial Lecture in his honour. Ralph Lilley Turner was born in 1888 and educated at The Perse School, Cambridge, and at Christ's College, Cambridge. He entered the Indian Education Service and during the First World War he served with the Gurkha Rifles. After the war he was Professor of Indian Linguistics at Benares University, until he was appointed to the Chair of Sanskrit in London. In 1937 he became Director of the School of Oriental Studies, soon to become the School of Oriental and African Studies, until 1957. He was knighted in 1950, and from 1957 he spent an active retirement working almost until his death in 1983 on the final stages of the supplements to his life's work, theComparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages.