Manuel José Andrade

From Jay Powell to Jay Miller (email 9-25-2017):

Mel Jacobs told me that when Andrade arrived in Seattle, sent in 1928, by Boas to work on Quileute (when it became apparent that Frachtenberg wasn't going to produce anything publishable on the Quileute language after his work in 1915–16. Mel picked him up at the train station , put him up for the night and then drove him out to LaPush, stopping at Port Townsend so that Andrade could meet the last of the Chimacum speakers. Mel sat in the car while Andrade went in and spoke with "the informant," reading the New York Times while Andrade was probably the last person who ever got his ear on Chimacum. 

Mel said that he thought he remembered that Andrade was a Spanish teacher who went to Boas and expressed an interest in anthropological linguistics. Boas gave him the texts that Ftachtenberg had taken down and said, "See what you can do with these...try to come up with a grammatical sketch." Andrade took the texts with English translation (Frachtenberg had a damned good ear for NW phonology). After working on the texts, Andrade went back and showed Boas his initial grammatical analysis, and Boas invited him on the spot to work with him (Boas) in a Columbia seminar group and then go out to spend six weeks in La Push.

Andrade worked with Hal George, who had also worked with Frachtenberg. Hal said about Andrade, "Hachitalhitali ti'yalh" (generous man) when Hal and I were working together in 1978. Andrade had Frachtenbergs and his own set of texts (with Quileute and grammatically sensitive translation on facing pages). It was ready for publication in CUCA in 1931 and his grammatical sketch of Ql came out in Vol 3 of the Handbook of Amer. Indian Langs. 1933. By 1930, Andrade was already working on Yucatec. 

He was at and associated with the University of Chicago, doing work in the Yucatan in 1930, 1931 and 1933. He almost had his grammatical sketch done before his "untimely death" in 1941.