❧ FUNERAL SERVICE recording (Lynn's eulogy is around 22:00.) 

❧ OBITUARY: On November 10, 2024, James Wesley Harris passed away peacefully at the age of 92. A native of Georgia, Jim was a longtime resident of Lexington, MA, and before that Boston, Cambridge, and Mexico City. Retired from the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he remains internationally recognized as a highly influential figure in the area of Romance linguistics, and “el decano” (“dean”) of Spanish phonology. He was also known for his expert musicianship, sweet demeanor and sharp wit, and devotion to his late wife of more than 50 years, Florence Warshawsky Harris (1937-2020). He leaves his daughter, Lynn Corinne Harris, his son-in-law, Rabbi David Adelson, and his grandchildren, Bee Adelson and Sam Harris, all of Brooklyn. 

Jim, an only child, was born in 1932 in the Atlanta suburb of East Point to a mostly Baptist and Methodist family. His father, Charles (Charlie) Wesley Harris, of Jersey, GA, worked hard for the railroad and cracked quiet jokes. His mother, Lucy Margaret Crawford Harris, a Sunday school teacher and magical seamstress—and her sisters, his doting aunts Bessie and Corinne—were from Cassville. Their mother’s family, the Redwines, from Prussia, traces their roots in the U.S. to the early 1700s and has six direct ancestral connections to the Revolutionary War effort. His father's mother's family, the Mobleys, also traces their roots back to the Revolution. 

His childhood was one of White Lily cornbread and perfect peaches, visits with cousins in the big country farmhouse, pet ducks named Maxine and Elliot, excellent grades, and dedication to music—piano and clarinet—starting in sixth grade and continuing to the Atlanta Youth Symphony and beyond.

Still, he chafed at the restrictive religious culture, mischievously at first. When he served as piano accompanist at church tent revivals, he secretly transposed the hymns up by maybe a minor third—not enough to be noticeable, but just enough to be uncomfortable. 

While his soul (and palate) remained connected to the south, in and after college, he left. As an undergraduate, he attended the University of Georgia, the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Mexico became his second home, Spanish his second first language. 

During the Korean War, he performed his military service as the clarinet and saxophone instructor at the U.S. Naval School of Music in Washington, D.C. After discharge, he directed the band at the Charlotte Hall School in Maryland, where he also taught Spanish, French, and Latin. 

He received an MA in linguistics from the Louisiana State University and a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT. Having achieved national recognition as an English-Spanish bilingual teacher and teacher-trainer he was engaged as a writer at the Modern Language Materials Development Center in New York. Later, he co-authored, with Guillermo Segreda, a series of popular college-level Spanish textbooks. 

He was an MIT faculty member for decades, serving as head of the department then called Foreign Languages and Literatures, eventually retiring as Professor Emeritus of Spanish and Linguistics. 

In his early days at MIT, when French, German, and Russian dominated as elite “languages of science and world literature,” he championed, over some opposition, the introduction of Spanish language and literature courses. He later oversaw inclusion of Japanese and Chinese courses as well. He promoted undergraduate courses in linguistics, leading to a full undergraduate degree program in linguistics—thus broadening the focus of the prestigious Ph.D. program. 

His research in linguistics centered on theoretical phonology and morphology. His books, presentations at professional meetings, and articles in peer-reviewed journals were among the most discussed—in both positive and negative assessments, as he says—by prominent scholars in the field. The ability to teach complex technical material comfortably in Spanish plus the status of an MIT professorship resulted in invitations to teach at universities across Spain and Latin America. He was also highly valued as a member of the editorial boards of several professional journals. 

From the 2016 festschrift The Syllable and Stress: Studies in Honor of James W. Harris (Ed. Rafael Nuñez): “Jim Harris has guided the work of a generation and more of linguistic scholarship.” 

Married in 1966, Jim and Florence were devoted concert goers, opera nerds, world travelers, dinner hosts, and synagogue members, with Jim serving for years as volunteer librarian at Temple Isaiah in Lexington, MA. Jim converted to Judaism, partly to become a full part of Florence’s world, and partly because he was drawn to the religion on his own. 

He and his daughter bonded closely over Spanish and Mexico, the Muppet Show and Monty Python, and music of all kinds. He loved animals, especially his dogs, and the cats always loved him best. He was known for his sly, multilingual, often unprintable sense of humor. He boasted daily about his grandchildren. 

He leaves a profound and lasting legacy, both to linguistics and to all the people who loved him. 

❧ OBITUARY in the MIT News: https://news.mit.edu/2024/professor-emeritus-james-harris-dies-1125