Karl Teeter; pursued passion for indigenous languages; at 78

Karl Van Duyn Teeter was fascinated with native languages in countries he visited, and over the course of his academic and professional career, he studied many, including Sudanese, Tunisian, Arabic, Amharic, Cherokee, Finnish, Igbo, Javanese, Yoruba, and Thai.

Once considered the last living speaker of Wiyot, an old tongue spoken by an Algonquian tribe in northern California, he compiled tapes and kept written records to help save the language .

Dr. Teeter, who had dropped out of high school but later earned a doctorate in linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley, died of a heart attack April 20 at his home in Cambridge. The retired Harvard professor was 78.

Born in Berkeley, Calif., and raised on a Lexington farm, Dr. Teeter attended Lexington schools but did not graduate, his family said. After serving as a supply sergeant in the Army from 1951 to 1954, stationed in Tokyo, he earned a bachelor's degree in Oriental languages from Berkeley in 1956 and a doctorate in 1962. He received an honorary master's from Harvard University in 1966.

He moved to Cambridge in 1959 and worked as a professor at Harvard from 1959 to 1989, when he retired. One of his most popular classes, linguistic field methods, is still taught at the university, according to Jay Jasanoff of Cambridge, a former student of Dr. Teeter's and the current chairman of the department of linguistics at Harvard University.

While he was initially interested in Japanese, Dr. Teeter studied two Algonquian Native American languages during his academic and professional career, Wiyot and the Maliseet language of tribes along the St. John River in New Brunswick.

When the last native speaker of Wiyot, Della Prince, died in 1962, Dr. Teeter was considered the only living speaker of the language.

"He was always the authority on Wiyot," Jasanoff said. "That was Karl's main contribution through his scholarship, transmitting that knowledge."

In 1964, Dr. Teeter published a book, "The Wiyot Language," and coauthored two volumes of "Wiyot Handbook," published in 1993 as part of the Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics Series. The handbook is currently used by language program coordinators for the Wiyot tribe in California to reestablish the language.

He is also the subject of a book published last year, "Tales from Maliseet Country: The Maliseet Texts of Karl V. Teeter," by Philip S. LeSourd, one of his former students.

"He would record collections of traditional stories told by elders there, and the book is a result of his work," said LeSourd, of Bloomington, Ind., who is now an associate professor of second languages studies and anthropology at Indiana University in Bloomington. "He let me use a collection of tape recordings that he made of the language spoken by very old people, some born before 1900. He was a real notable expert on the language."

Storytelling captivated him, his family said.

"He learned the language mostly through storytelling, and it was the people that fascinated him," said his daughter Judith Teeter, of Pittsburgh. "The language was all mixed up with the culture. He was so interested in the way they would weave their stories in their everyday lives. It's amazing the way he learned a language from scratch, through informants telling stories. And then, with the Wiyot, you lose a language, but you can get it back, because you have someone who is actually preserving it."

He applied linguistic analysis to the 10 other languages he studied, his family said.

Dr. Teeter was a founder and board member of the Endangered Language Fund, based in New Haven, and was a member of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the WBGH Educational Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Mashantucket, Conn.

He was diagnosed with Merkel cell cancer in 2002, his family said.

Dr. Teeter loved dogs and mystery novels, and always rode his bike to work. He had hundreds of cookbooks and often made bread, beer, and wine, his family said. A fan of jazz, he played the cornet.

In addition to his daughter, he leaves his wife of 55 years, Anita Maria (Bonacorsi), three other daughters, Katharine Thomas of Cambridge, Teresa Sargent of Jaffrey, N.H., and Martha Cregan of North Reading; two brothers, Laurence of Puyallup, Wash., and John Stephen of Lebanon, N.H.; three sisters, Alice Uyttebrouck of Naperville, Ill., Martha of Davis, Calif., and Susannah Nuriel of Tacoma; 12 grandchildren; one great-grandson; and seven step-great-grandchildren.

A funeral will be held at 11 a.m. tomorrow at Keefe Funeral Home in Cambridge, followed by a reception.