James Marshall Unger (born May 28, 1947, in

Cleveland Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–U.S. maritime border and approximately west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania st ...

Ohio Ohio ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Lake Erie to the north, Pennsylvania to the east, West Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Indiana to the ...

) is

emeritus professor ''Emeritus/Emerita'' () is an honorary title granted to someone who retires from a position of distinction, most commonly an academic faculty position, but is allowed to continue using the previous title, as in "professor emeritus". In some c ...

of Japanese at the

Ohio State University The Ohio State University (Ohio State or OSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio, United States. A member of the University System of Ohio, it was founded in 1870. It is one ...

. He specializes in

historical linguistics Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages. Historical li ...

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

Edo period The , also known as the , is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional ''daimyo'', or feudal lords. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengok ...

. He chaired academic departments at the

University of Hawaii at Manoa A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Univ ...

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, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

, and the Ohio State University from 1988 to 2004 and has been a visiting professor/researcher at Kōbe University, Tsukuba University, the University of Tōkyō, the National Museum for Ethnography in Senri, and the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) in

Tachikawa file:Autumn colors in Showa memorial park.jpg, 250px, Showa Memorial Park is a Cities of Japan, city located in the western Tokyo, western portion of the Tokyo Metropolis, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 184,383 in 93,428 househ ...

. 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 $25,000 (about $550,000 in 2023) gift from Edsel Ford. ...

, and the

Japan Foundation The is a Japanese foundation that spreads Japanese culture around the world. Based in Tokyo, it was established in 1972 by an Act of the National Diet as a special legal entity to undertake international dissemination of Japanese culture. I ...

(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 Historical linguists Linguists of Japanese Yale University alumni Academic staff of the University of Tokyo