Ernst Oswald Johannes Westphal

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Westphal, Ernst Oswald Johannes (1919-1990), was a South African linguist and an expert in Bantu and Khoisan languages.

Ernst Westphal was born at Khalava in Vendaland, the son of German Lutheran missionary parents; already as a child he was fluent in German, English, Afrikaans and Venda. He studied Zulu and Southern Sotho under Clement Martyn Doke at the University of Witwatersrand and, after graduating in 1942, was a Lecturer there 1942-1947. He was Lecturer in Bantu Languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies in at the University of London 1949-1962, and Professor of African Languages in the School of African studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa from 1962 until his retirement in 1984.

His doctoral thesis The Sentence in Venda (London University, 1955) was supposedly based entirely on his own knowledge of the language, using no other informant. According to Rycroft's obituary, Westphal, although originally an expert in the Bantu languages, was fluent in more than a dozen Southern African languages and eventually became "an acknowledged world authority" on the Khoisan languages.

Westphal's family has been deeply involved in the cultural life of South Africa for over a hundred years. His grandfather, Gotthilf Ernst Westphal, for example, saw the potential of the teenage Sol Plaatje, then a student at the Mission Station in Pniel, and gave him private tuition. Among other contributions, Plaatje was a founder and first General Secretary of the ANC. Like E.O.J. Westphal, he possessed extraordinary linguistic gifts, and was a polyglot in five or more languages.

A Festschrift was posthumously published in his honour, African linguistic contributions: presented in honour of Ernst Westphal, ed. by Derek F. Gowlett (Pretoria: Via Afrika, 1992).

[edit] Bibliography

• A bibliography of Westphal's published works is appended to David Rycroft's obituary (see below).

[edit] References

• David Rycroft, "Professor Ernst Oswald Johannes Westphal (1919-1990)" [obituary], African Languages and Cultures, Vol. 5 (1992), pp. 91-95. (Available online with JSTOR subscription.[1])