Welmers, William Everett, 1916-1988

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African languages
African languages--Tone
Africa, West--Languages

found: NUCMC data from Joint Archives of Holland Archives, Hope College, for His Papers, 1942-1982(Welmers, William Everett, 1916-1988; Hope College class of 1936; professor of African languages at Univ. of Calif. at LA, 1960-1982)

found: William Welmers (1916-1988), from University of California: In Memoriam (1990), viewed online Sep. 14, 2017(William E. Welmers; Bill Welmers; born April 4, 1916 in Orange City, Iowa, grew up in Holland, Michigan; philosophy degree 1935, Hope College; Th.B. and Th.M. degrees in Old Testament and Semitics, Westminster Theological Seminary, 1935-1939; studied Twi language at University of Pennsylvania, taught Chinese and Japanese there for the Army Specialized Training Program; ordained minister of the Knox Orthodox Presbyterian Church; went to Liberia in 1946 for 3 years, studying Kpelle; traveled to Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria, and Ethiopia; on faculty at Cornell 1950-1954; in 1956 he joined the Kennedy School of Missions at the Hartford Seminary Foundation; in 1960 he went to UCLA as the first professor of languages in Africa south of the Sahara, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages, soon renamed Department of Near Eastern and African Languages; transferred to the new Department of Linguistics in 1966; taught Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, Kru, and other West African languages, and properties of African languages; especially interested in tonal systems of African languages; his African Language Structures was published in 1973; retired in 1982; died March 5, 1988 in Lakeview, Arkansas)