Homenagem a ElsaGomez-Imbert / In remembrance of Elsa Gomez-Imbert

[kris.s...@gmail.com]

Elsa Gomez-Imbert, a farewell

On December 20, 2024, the community of Amazonian linguists lost a prominent and well-loved scholar, mentor, and friend, Elsa Gomez-Imbert, who passed away suddenly at her home in Cajarc (Lot), in southern France.  She was 80 years old.

Elsa was born in Duitama, Boyacá, Colombia, but her keen intellect, aptitude for French, and academic interests eventually took her to France, where she completed her graduate degrees and became a CNRS researcher and director of research linked to the University of Toulouse. During her long academic career, she was a visiting scholar at universities and research institutions in Brazil and spent a semester at MIT in the United States. She also worked for extended periods in Colombia, where she was highly involved in the Posgrado en Etnoligüistica at la Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, a master’s level program under the leadership of Jon Landaburu that trained a cohort of indigenous linguists so that they could study their own languages. These efforts also gave rise to the Centro Colombiano de Estudios de Lenguas Aborígenes (CCELA).  Elsa delighted in discussions of data from indigenous languages and was a generous colleague to fellow researchers and dedicated advisor to numerous students.

Her groundbreaking work focused on Tukanoan languages of the northwest Amazon. She conducted fieldwork from the 1970s through the 1990s primarily in the Piraparaná region with speakers of Tatuyo and Barasana. In 1982, Elsa defended her PhD thesis at the Sorbonne Université, a study of noun classification in Tatuyo “De la forme et du sens dans la classification nominale en Tatuyo (langue Tukano Orientale d'Amazonie Colombienne)”, and in 1997, she was awarded a prestigious Doctorat D’Etat from the Université de Paris for her analysis of Barasana morphology and phonology “Morphologie et Phonologie Barasana: approche non-linéaire”. During her time in the field, Elsa interacted closely with Colombian linguists and anthropologists, contributing the “Introducción a la Amazonia: parte septentrional” and, together with Stephen Hugh-Jones, the chapter “Introducción a las lenguas del Piraparaná (Vaupés)” to the monumental Lenguas Indígenas de Colombia: una visión descriptiva (2000, in M. S. González de Pérez & M. L. Rodríguez de Montes (eds.) Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 317-320; 321-356). During this early phase, among other things, Elsa also published analyses of Tatuyo and Barasana narratives, articles discussing proposals for practical orthographies and teaching materials developed in partnerships with language community members. Her collection of fieldwork recordings and materials gathered between 1976 and 1994 is accessible through the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA, University of Texas, Austin) https://ailla.utexas.org/collections/841/.

The extensive list of Gomez-Imbert publications includes works in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English. Continuing research on the topics of her theses, Elsa published additional studies of nasality and tone in “Nasalité en Barasana” (1998, Langues et Grammaire (II-III): Phonologie, Saint-Denis: Paris 8-Documents de Travail Langues & Grammaire #6: 43-60) and “Barasana Tone and Accent” (2000, IJAL 66(4): 419-463, co-authored with Michael Kenstowicz), and noun classification in “When animals become ‘rounded’ and ‘feminine’: conceptual categories and linguistic classification in a multilingual setting” (1996, in J. J. Gumperz & S. C. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, Cambridge University Press, 438-469), and “Tukanoan nominal classification: the Tatuyo system” (2007, in L. Wetzels (ed.) Language Endangerment and Endangered Languages: Linguistic and Anthropological Studies with Special Emphasis on the Languages and Cultures of the Andean-Amazonian Border Area, Leiden: Publications of the Research School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies (CNWS), 401-428).

But Elsa’s interests did not stop with these topics. The breadth of her intellectual curiosity can be seen in her studies of serial verb constructions, including “Construcciones seriales en tatuyo y barasana (familia tukano): hacia una tipología de la serialización verbal” (2007, in A. Romero-Figueroa, A. Fernández Garay, & A. Corbera Mori (eds.) Lenguas indígenas de América del Sur: Estudios descriptivo-tipológicos y sus contribuciones para la lingüística teórica, Caracas: Ediciones UCAB, 172-189), and of linguistic exogamy and language contact, addressed in “Force des langues vernaculaires en situation d'exogamie linguistique: le cas du Vaupés colombien (Nord-ouest amazonien)” (1991, in J. Charmes (ed.) Plurilinguisme et développement. Cahiers des Sciences Humaines 27.3-4: 535-559) and later, “Contato linguístico e mudança linguística no noroeste amazônico: o caso do Kotiria (Wanano)” (2009, Revista da ABRALIN Vol. 8(2), 71–100, the first of our three collaborations as coauthors.

Evidentiality, or “cognitive modality”, was another of Elsa’s great interests, being the focus of “Conocimiento y verdad en tatuyo” (1986, Antropología 2: 117-25), “Voir et entendre comme sources de connaissance grammaticalement explicites” (2003, in Vandeloise C. (ed.) Langues et cognition, Paris: Hermès Science Publications, 117-133), “La vue ou l’ouïe: la modalité cognitive des langues Tukano orientales” (2007, in S. Guentchéva & J. Landaburu (eds.) L’énoncé médiatisé VOL. II, Louvain: Peeters, 65-85), and our second joint publication “Evidentiality in Tukanoan languages” (2018, in A. Y. Aikhenvald (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality, Oxford University Press, 357-387).

A culminating work in Elsa’s career, the chapter on the Tukanoan language family, will appear in an upcoming volume of Amazonian Languages: An International Handbook. It represents my final collaboration with Elsa and was well advanced at the time of her death. I hope it will stand as a testament to her lasting contribution to the study of these fascinating languages and her well-earned status as the Grande Dame among “Tukanologists”. 

In the early 2000s, Elsa partnered with fellow scholars of Amazonian languages to found the international AMAZONICAS Colloquium, held and hosted in a different Amazonian country every two years and whose tenth edition will take place in August, 2025 in Belém, Brazil. As a visiting scholar in Bogotá in 2010, Elsa organized the third AMAZONICAS meeting together with colleagues from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia de Bogotá. It was a week that those of us fortunate enough to attend will never forget, not only for its academic excellence but because of the grace, hospitality, and warmth of its primary hostess. 

Elsa, you dazzled us with your intellect, charmed us with your smile, and filled our hearts with lovely memories. We will miss you dearly!

Kristine Stenzel
(with input from many of Elsa’s friends and colleagues)