Benjamin Smith Lyman
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Benjamin Smith Lyman (b. 1835, Northampton, Massachusetts - d. 1920) was an American mining engineer.
He graduated from Harvard University in 1855, then studied at the Ecoles des Mines in Paris (1859 -1861), and at the Freiburg (Saxony) Mining Academy (1861 - 1862).
In 1870 he surveyed oil fields for the Public Works Department of the government of India. From 1873 -1879 he was chief geologist and mining engineer to the Japanese government. He was assistant on the Pennsylvania Geological Survey from 1887 until 1895.
In his study of the Japanese language, he noticed that a necessary condition for the voicing (technically rendaku) of the initial obstruent of the second word in a compound is that the word contain no voiced obstruent in a later syllable. (A sufficient condition for predicting rendaku is not known.) This constraint has come to be known as Lyman's Law.
Lyman wrote the following papers:
- General Report on the Punjab Oil Lands (1878)
- Preliminary Report on the First Season's Work on the Geological Survey of Yesso (1874)
- A General Report on the Geology of Yesso (1877)
- Geological Survey of Japan (1879)
- Japanese Swords (1892)
- Change from surd to sonant in Japanese compounds (1894)
- The Philippines (1907)
This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.
Lyman Collection at University of Massachusetts [1]
