Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From Amy Dahlstrom on Facebook yesterday, an obituary for Ives Goddard (who was, oh dear, a year younger than I am) from the Smithsonian Institution:

Ives Goddard III [Robert Hale Ives Goddard III] (1941-2025) passed away peacefully in his sleep on the evening of August 6. Ives earned his A.B. (1963) and Ph.D. (1969) from Harvard University. Following a stint as a junior professor at Harvard after his Ph.D., in 1975 he came to the Smithsonian to work as a linguist and as the technical editor of the Handbook of North American Indians. After he retired in 2007, he continued his research as a curator emeritus.

Ives was a renowned linguist known as a leading expert on Algonquian languages.

… He will be fondly remembered for his dry wit, encyclopedic knowledge of Indigenous languages, generosity to language learners and to other scholars, and passionate support for linguistics and language revitalization.

My first response:

— AZ: A wonderful man. Tremendously erudite and charmingly amusing. We met through LSA committee service, so I seized on him as an exemplar of the side benefits of such service; I can’t imagine how we would otherwise have come across one another.

Then an exchange with Sarah [Sally] Thomason on Facebook:

— ST: I met him during my sophomore year in college …, when I took my first linguistics course; he struck me as patrician; he did know his stuff though. [AZ: 😀; IG later went on to mentor ST’s daughter Lucy Thomason]

— AZ > ST: He was genuinely patrician (from NOAD, noun patrician, sense [b]: ‘(North American) a member of a long-established wealthy family’), though in no way contemptuous or pretentious — indeed, so far from pretentious that he seems to have concealed [well, not mentioned] his family background for the sake of his career in linguistics and anthropology; he would not have wanted to seem to be putting on airs.

A story from when we served together on an LSA committee, at a dinner in a Szechuan restaurant in DC. Ives ordered something extraordinarily fiery, saying that it reminded him of some inflammatory Mexican food he loved. At which point his face broke out in the most amazing drenching sweat I’ve ever seen. He apologized profusely, explaining that the effect was genetic, an unfortunate consequence of his Yankee background, but that he was actually delighted with the food (indeed, he was beaming happily), very much enjoying its “sheer animal pleasure”. Perfect Ives, cloaking raw physicality in an elegant turn of phrase.

The Goddard family line, all in Providence RI. First, from Wikipedia:

Robert Hale Ives Goddard (September 21, 1837 – April 22, 1916) was a prominent banker, industrialist, U.S. Army officer, state senator and philanthropist. He was a son of William Giles Goddard and Charlotte Rhoda (née Ives) Goddard. Among his siblings was brother, William Goddard, who also served in the Civil War as a major in the 1st Rhode Island Infantry and was breveted to the rank of colonel for meritorious service during the war. His maternal grandfather, Thomas Poynton Ives, was a prominent merchant who founded Brown & Ives [in the 18th century] with his brother-in-law, Nicholas Brown Jr. [AZ: a firm that became prominently attached to abolitionist causes]

… On January 26, 1870, Goddard married Rebekah Burnet Groesbeck (1840–1914). Rebekah was the daughter of U.S. Representative William Slocum Groesbeck and Elizabeth (née Burnet) Groesbeck of Cincinnati, Ohio. Together, they were the parents of three children:

… [third child] Robert Hale Ives Goddard Sr. (1880–1959), who married Margaret Hazard, granddaughter of Rowland G. Hazard, and was involved with Brown & Ives, the family investment firm.

Then, from the Family Search site:

On July 15, 1908, RHIG Sr. married Margaret Hazard (as just above). They were the parents of at least two sons, the first of which was RHIG Jr.  (1909-2003). (You will see that the family didn’t beginning using the generational suffixes Sr., Jr., III until the second generation.)

In 1937, RHIG Jr. married Hope Linton Drury. They were the parents of at least four sons, of whom the first was RHIG III (1941-2025). Who chose to use, of all his names, Ives (a family name going back to the 18th century), as his personal name, but kept the generational suffix III. The Algonquianist Ives Goddard.

This entry was posted on August 9, 2025 at 11:58 am and is filed under Death notices, Indigenous peoples, Linguists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.