Ilse Lehiste

Ilse Lehiste was an Estonian-American linguist born January 31, 1922, in Tallinn, Estonia, and died December 25, 2010, in Worthington, Ohio. She specialized in acoustic phonetics and phonology, prosody, and language contact, with particular expertise in Estonian and Serbo-Croatian, and also studied Estonian runic songs. After positions at Kansas Wesleyan University, the Detroit Institute of Technology, and the University of Michigan, she became a founding member and first chair of the Ohio State University linguistics department, established in 1965, retiring as professor emerita in 1987. She authored roughly twenty books and two hundred research papers, including Suprasegmentals in 1970 and Readings in Acoustic Phonetics in 1977, served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1980, and received the Medal for Scientific Achievement from the International Speech Communication Association in 2002.