James Marshall Unger (born May 28, 1947, in

Cleveland Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the United States, U.S. U.S. state, state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along ...

Ohio Ohio () is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. Of the List of states and territories of the United States, fifty U.S. states, it is the List of U.S. states and territories by area, 34th-l ...

) is

emeritus professor ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

of Japanese at the

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best pub ...

. He specializes in

historical linguistics Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: # to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages # ...

and the writing systems of East Asia, but he has also published on

Japanese mathematics denotes a distinct kind of mathematics which was developed in Japan during the Edo period (1603–1867). The term ''wasan'', from ''wa'' ("Japanese") and ''san'' ("calculation"), was coined in the 1870s and employed to distinguish native Japanese ...

of the

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was character ...

. He chaired academic departments at the

University of Hawaii at Manoa A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, th ...

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of ...

, and the Ohio State University from 1988 to 2004 and has been a visiting professor/researcher at Kōbe University,

Tsukuba University is a public research university located in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. It is a top 10 Designated National University, and was ranked Type A by the Japanese government as part of the Top Global University Project. The university has 28 college ...

, the University of Tōkyō, the National Museum for Ethnography in Senri, and the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) in

Tachikawa 250px, Showa Memorial Park is a city located in the western portion of Tokyo Metropolis, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 184,383 in 93,428 households, and a population density of 7600 persons per km2. The total area of the ci ...

. Among various research grants, he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation,

Ford Foundation The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the stated goal of advancing human welfare. Created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, it was originally funded by a US$25,000 gift from Edsel Ford. By 1947, after the death ...

, and the

Japan Foundation The was established in 1972 by an Act of the National Diet as a special legal entity to undertake international dissemination of Japanese culture, and became an Independent Administrative Institution under the jurisdiction of the Ministr ...

(twice).

Books

* ''Studies in Early Japanese Morphophonemics'' (Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1977; 2nd ed. 1993) * With F. C. Lorish, M. Noda, Y. Wada ''A Framework for Introductory Japanese Language Curricula in American High Schools and Colleges'' (Washington, D.C.: National Foreign Language Center, 1993) * ''The Fifth Generation Fallacy'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) * ''Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) * ''Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning'' (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004) * ''The Role of Contact in the Origins of the Japanese and Korean Languages'' (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2009) * ''Sangaku Proofs: a Japanese Mathematician at Work'' (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 2015) * ''Sangaku Reflections: a Japanese Mathematician Teaches'' (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 2017)

References

Notes Other sources * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Unger, J. Marshall American Japanologists Ohio State University faculty 1947 births Living people Linguists from the United States Paleolinguists Linguists of Japanese