A. J. Aitken
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Adam Jack Aitken (19 June 1921 – 11 February 1998) was a
Education and military service
Aitken was born on 19 June 1921 in
He served as a lance bombardier in the
Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue
He graduated MA with First Class Honours in English Language and Literature in 1947. In 1948 he was appointed Assistant to
Aitken was one of the first to appreciate the potential of the computer for research in the Arts. Although computer methods arrived too late to be of central importance in the collection process for DOST, he set up, with Paul Bratley and Neil Hamilton-Smith, the Older Scots Textual Archive, a computer-readable archive of over one million words of Older Scots literature.
For most of his career, up to 1979, Aitken combined his work on DOST with teaching, as a Lecturer and latterly Reader in the Department of English Language, University of Edinburgh. He can be said to have created 'Scots language' as a university subject. The handouts that he produced in the 1950s for his courses on Scots language were for many years the only clear summaries of Scots vocabulary, phonology, orthography, grammar and stylistics, and they circulated widely amongst scholars. Over time he made much of this material available in print, and his writings largely form the foundation of the subject.
Honours
He was chairman of the Language Committee of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies 1971–1976; chairman of the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland 1978–1981 and honorary president from 1994; vice-president of the Scottish Text Society from 1985; Honorary Preses of the Scots Language Society from 1994; honorary vice-president of the Scottish National Dictionary Association from 1995; and honorary vice-president of the Robert Henryson Society from 1996. In 1981 the British Academy awarded him the Biennial Sir Israel Gollancz Prize. In 1983 he was awarded a DLitt by the University of Edinburgh, and was appointed honorary professor in 1984. In 1987, he was presented with a Festschrift: The Nuttis Schell, Essays on the Scots Language presented to A J Aitken.
Aitken is well known for his formulation of the
Death
He retired in 1986 and died on 11 February 1998 of
References
- Macafee, Caroline. "Aitken, (Adam) Jack". doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/69429. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- Caroline Macafee, 'Obituary: A. J. Aitken (1921–1998)’, English World-Wide 19:2 (1998) 275–285 http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/eww.19.2.09mac DOI: 10.1075/eww.19.2.09mac
- Bawcutt, Priscilla (18 February 1998). "Obituary: Professor A. J. Aitken". The Independent. Archived from the original on 20 March 2014. Retrieved 4 January 2021.
- Caroline Macafee, 'Professor A J Aitken', The Herald (14 February 1998) http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/spl/aberdeen/professor-a-j-aitken-1.354441
- J Derrick McClure 'Professor Jack Aitken. The word in Scotland', The Guardian (10 March 1998) https://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/guardian/doc/188142614.html?FMT=CITE&FMTS=CITE:AI&type=historic&date=Mar+10%2C+1998&author=J+Derrick+McClure&pub=The+Guardian+%281959-2003%29&edition=&startpage=&desc=The+word+in+Scotland
- "History of DOST". dsl.ac.uk/. Retrieved 4 January 2021.
- Caroline Macafee and Iseabail Macleod, eds. The Nuttis Schell. Essays on the Scots Language Presented to A J Aitken (Aberdeen University Press, 1987)
- A. J. Aitken, ed. Caroline Macafee, The Older Scots Vowels: A History of the Stressed Vowels of Older Scots from the Beginnings to the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 2002)
- A. J. Aitken,'The Scottish Vowel Length-Rule' in A. J. Aitken, M. Benskin and M. L. Samuels, eds., So meny people longages and tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English presented to Angus McIntosh (Edinburgh, 1981)