Keith McCune

Keith Michael McCune is a linguist, novelist, and translator. His study of Indonesian roots has been called "perhaps the most detailed and complete single work in the field of phonosemantics,"^[1] while his retelling of the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin earned praise from Michael Boyer, the official Piper Piper of Hamelin, Germany.^[2]

Biography

McCune was born in 1955 to Frederick and Marguerite McCune. He attended college at the University of Virginia and went on to get his doctorate in linguistics at the University of Michigan,^[3] where he met Grace Osborn, who was also pursuing a doctorate in linguistics and later married him.

He and Grace joined The Evangelical Alliance Mission and spent five years in the Philippines, translating part of Genesis into Ibanag. In 1992, they moved to Russia, where they planted churches in Moscow, Makhachkala, and Krasnodar,^[4] then continued their ministry in Odessa, Ukraine.^[5] In 2009, they returned to the Philippines as Bible translation consultants.^[6]

Keith and Grace have three children, Adam, Arwen, and Eden.^[7]

Publications

• The Internal Structure of Indonesian Roots (Nusa, 1985) was his two-volume doctoral dissertation at University of Michigan in 1983 before it was published two years later in Jakarta, Indonesia by the Universitas Katolik Indonesia Atma Jaya, as volumes 21 and 22 of their NUSA series.
• "The Tale of the Good Wife" (Cricket 26.11, July 1999, 27-31) is a retelling of a Kumyk folk tale from Dagestan, a province of Russia where McCune spent two years planting a church.
• The Rats of Hamelin (Moody Publishers, 2005) is a historical fantasy novel he coauthored with his son, Adam McCune. It is a retelling of the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Notes

External links

• The Rats of Hamelin website
• Keith McCune's MySpace Music page
• McCune missionary page on the website of The Evangelical Alliance Mission