Helen-Jo HEWITT

HEWITT, Helen-Jo Jakusz "HJ" Helen-Jo (HJ) Jakusz Hewitt passed away at the age of 90 in Austin, TX, on November 26, 2017. She is survived by her devoted caregiver, Maria Castillo, and by friends and colleagues who remember her fondly as a strong, opinionated and set-in-her-ways woman who cherished the memories of her research and study period in New Zealand as a Fulbright Scholar, cared deeply about nature and the environment, and was devoted to the spoken and written word.

Born and raised in Elkhart, Indiana, HJ earned a BA in English and Speech from the State University of Iowa, an MS in Speech Pathology and Linguistics from Purdue University, and a PhD in Foreign Language Education with specializations in Linguistics and Folklore from the University of Texas at Austin, where she matriculated as a Ford Foundation Fellow. To augment her 1972 PhD, HJ also pursued a Master's degree in Library Science. While the ambition of her younger years was to become an opera singer, HJ began her professional career as teacher and speech therapist, and devoted the bulk of her academic career to the study of language and historical linguistics, working as a librarian, linguist, lexicographer, bibliographer, and editor at the University of Texas at Austin's Linguistics Research Center. She also spent eighteen months as an Information Specialist for the CYC Common Sense Knowledge Base Project at the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC). Among her publications are bibliographic articles on the linguistics of Australasia and Oceania (late 1960s); the paper "FANTASTICATS: Fabulous Felines from Science Fiction and Fantasy" (1970s); the report "Linguistic Documentation of METAL System" (1978, documentation of the third-generation machine translation system designated METAL, Mechanical Translation and Analysis of Languages, with Lehmann, Pflueger, and Amsler); the paper "Computers, Bibliography, and Foreign Language Typography" (1985); the book Language Typology 1988: Typological Models in the Service of Reconstruction (with Lehmann, 1988); and the book Biblical Hebrew: An Analytical Introduction (1999, with Lehman and Raizen).

Ferociously independent, HJ insisted on remaining in her own living environment, and indeed spent all but the last week of her life in her own apartment, surrounded by her beloved science-fiction book collection, seashells, plants, and Maori native art pieces. Among her documents, her friends found the following poem, attributed to Jan Struther and copied in HJ's beautiful hand:

One day my life will end; and lest
Some whim should prompt you to review it,
Let her who knows the subject best
Tell you the shortest way to do it:
Then say, "Here lies one doubly blest."
Say, "She was happy." Say, "She knew it."

HJ chose to be cremated. A memorial gathering will be organized by her colleagues and friends. For information contact eraizen4@gmail.com.