Remembering Arvo Eek and Ilse Lehiste

• Main Author: Diana Krull
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Yakutsk
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1047.4544; http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2%3A630315/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Abstract This paper contains the author's memories of her two late colleagues, compatriots and friends Arvo Eek and Ilse Lehiste from the beginning of the nineties and the following years. They contain mainly episodes, opinions and discussions from the world of phonetics, especially Estonian phonetics. Arvo Eek After Estonia became independent again in 1991, new possibilities opened up for Estonian scholars to work abroad. In Sweden, funds could be sought from the Swedish Institute in order to invite Baltic scholars to work as visiting researchers in Sweden and create contacts with Swedish colleagues. I made use of this possibility and thus several Estonians could come to Sweden and work here for short periods. One of them was Arvo Eek. He was already known among many Swedish phoneticians through the 11 th International Conference of Phonetic Sciences held in Tallinn 1987, where he was one of the organizers. I and several of my Stockholm colleagues had also read his articles in Estonian Papers of Phonetics and appreciated his work. Arvo Eek worked as a guest researcher at Stockholm University on several occasions during the years 1992-1994. Here he could use modern technology not yet available in Estonia at the time, and this was of course of great use to him in his studies of the acoustics of Estonian speech. However, I myself had maybe even greater use of his stay in Stockholm. I had started my studies in phonetics late in life and there was much in Estonian phonetics that was new to me. We had long talks about the acoustics of Estonian vowels and about the Estonian degrees of quantity, a subjects on which he was very knowledgeable. When he was back in Estonia, we maintained contact by e-mail and sent each other our newest papers. I also used Arvo Eek as a speaker for my studies of Estonian, especially of spontaneous speech. He could easily keep up a lively monologue for almost an hour, telling stories from his childhood and from his travels in the Soviet Union from Yakutsk to Tajikistan in connection with his ...