William Gedney

A year before 1967's famed Summer of Love, documentary photographer William Gedney set out for San Francisco on a Guggenheim Fellowship to record “aspects of our culture which I believe significant and which I hope will become, in time, part of the visual record of American history.” A Time of Youth brings together eighty-seven of the more than two thousand photographs Gedney took in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood between October 1966 and January 1967. In these photographs Gedney documents the restless and intertwined lives of the disenchanted youth who flocked to what became the epicenter of 1960s counterculture. Gedney lived among these young people in their communal homes, where he captured the intimate and varied contours of everyday life: solitude and companionship, joyous celebration and somber quiet, cramped rooms and spacious parks, recreation and contemplation. In these images Gedney presents a portrait of a San Francisco counterculture that complicates popular depictions of late 1960s youth as carefree flower children. The book also includes facsimiles of handwritten descriptions of the scenes Gedney photographed, his thoughts on organizing the book, and other ephemera.

For most of his career Professor William J. Gedney has devoted his scholarly research to an indepth exploration and recording of Tai languages and dialects. These endeavors have resulted in numerous scholarly papers and seven lengthy volumes devoted to Tai languages and dialects. Models of clarity and precision, Gedney’s studies have helped to establish the field of historical comparative Tai studies. What is not so well known is his contribution to folklore, translation, and literature. This volume, William J. Gedney’s Thai and Indic Literary Studies, remedies that situation. In this volume, Gedney discusses Thai Riddles, problems in translating Thai poetry, and historical development and Sanskrit influences in Thai verse forms. The papers in this volume with their insights and new interpretations will undoubtedly contribute to a better understanding and appreciation of Thai literature and its history.

Little research had been conducted on Saek, a Tai-family language spoken by the Saek people of Laos and Thailand, until the preeminent linguist William J. Gedney began his exhaustive study of it in the 1960s. Never before published, Gedney’s field data on Saek are collected here, including a 550-page glossary and 450 pages of Saek oral literature presented in free translation and linear glosses. The volume concludes with two important, previously unpublished Gedney papers, “Saek Final-L: Archaism or Innovation?” and “The Twelve Year Names in Saek.” While William J. Gedney’s “The Saek Language” offers a particularly rich vein of primary data to specialists in comparative Tai, its texts—ranging from oral histories and descriptions of Saek life to folktales—are also of value to historians, anthropologists, and folklorists. Introductions contextualize the linguistic data for more general readers.

In the 1960s and 1970s, William J. Gedney, the preeminent authority on Tai languages and literatures, conducted extensive investigations into a large number of Tai dialects. Employing careful and exhaustive elicitation techniques, he compiled glossaries, texts, and cultural notes from hitherto undescribed, or poorly described, dialects and languages. One of the most extensive is Yay, a language belonging to the Northern Branch of the Tai family, spoken in northern Vietnam and southern China. Gedney’s work on Yay, published in this volume, consists of a lengthy glossary and a collection of folktales and traditional songs. The latter texts are reproduced with interlinear glosses and free translations. The volume will be of interest to linguists, folklorists, anthropologists, and specialists in Southeast Asian or comparative linguistics.

Another dialect exhaustively studied by William J. Gedney is Lungming, a Tai dialect spoken in and around the town of Lungming, in Kwangsi, China. In addition to compiling the massive glossary published in this volume, Gedney elicited several thousand Lungming sentences. Also reproduced and translated, these serve to illustrate syntactic patterns and vocabulary items. Combined in The Tai Dialect of Lungming, these data represent one of the most complete examinations yet undertaken of a dialect belonging to the Central Branch of the Tai language family. As with Gedney’s The Yay Language, these materials will be of particular value to linguists, comparativists, folklorists, and anthropologists.

The publication of this volume of selected writings of William J. Gedney is a welcome event in Tai linguistics. It marks one of the high points in the varied career of a distinguished teacher, scholar, university administrator, and office holder in professional organizations. There are fourteen papers in this book, ranging in date from 1961 to 1980. Twelve of these discuss comnparative Tai linguistics, one Siamese vocabulary, and one Siamese verse forms.

The publication of this volume of selected writings of William J. Gedney is a welcome event in Tai linguistics. It marks one of the high points in the varied career of a distinguished teacher, scholar, university administrator, and office holder in professional organizations. There are fourteen papers in this book, ranging in date from 1961 to 1980. Twelve of these discuss comnparative Tai linguistics, one Siamese vocabulary, and one Siamese verse forms.