Roy Andrew Miller

Roy Andrew Miller (September 5, 1924 – August 22, 2014) was an American linguist best known as the author of several books on Japanese language and linguistics, and for his advocacy of Korean and Japanese as members of the proposed Altaic language family.

Miller was born in Winona, Minnesota, on September 5, 1924, to Andrew and Jessie (née Eickelberry) Miller.

Long a student of languages, his early work in the 1950s was largely with Chinese and Tibetan.

In 1953, he completed a Ph.D. in Chinese and Japanese at Columbia University in New York.

He was Professor of Linguistics at the International Christian University in Tokyo from 1955 to 1963.

He wrote extensively on the Japanese language, from A Japanese Reader (1963) and The Japanese Language (1967) to Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages (1971) and Nihongo: In Defense of Japanese (1986).

Subsequently he taught at Yale University; between 1964 and 1970, he was chairman of the department of East and South Asian Languages and Literatures.

For example, in 1969 he wrote the Encyclopædia Britannica entry on the Tibeto-Burman languages of South Asia.

From 1970 until 1989 he held a similar post at the University of Washington in Seattle.

He then taught in Europe, mainly in Germany and Scandinavia.

On the occasion of his 75th birthday, Professors Karl Menges and Nelly Naumann prepared a Festschrift highlighting his career and including articles on Altaic languages.

He later broadened his scope by linking Korean both to Japanese and Altaic, most notably in Languages and History: Japanese, Korean, and Altaic (1996).