W. Percival Obituary

February 24, 1930- December 6, 2020

W. Keith Percival was born in Leeds, England. As a child, one of Keith's joys was to sit wedged tightly with his father in the same easy chair listening to him read aloud. Just before the outbreak of the war with Germany in 1939, Keith was evacuated to the rural village of Pool-in-Wharfedale. He returned to Leeds just in time to experience the air-raids by the Luftwaffe. In 1941 he earned a scholarship to attend Leeds Boys Modern School, where he became interested in modern languages. He invented languages of his own with different grammars, arranging them in a family tree.

Keith did his undergraduate work in German at Leeds University from 1948 to 1951. He then took courses in Scandinavian languages at Uppsala University and began studying Russian. In 1953, he was conscripted into the British Army as a member of the Intelligence Corps. He translated French military documents into English while enjoying French cuisine and wine. In 1955, he began his doctoral studies at Yale in Linguistics, developing a grammar of Toba Batak, a language spoken in Sumatra. He was hired in 1960 to work on a computerized grammar of German at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He often said that his time at MIT changed his entire intellectual orientation.

In 1964 he became chairman of Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Three years later, he met Alice Iverson at a linguistics conference in Bucharest, Romania. She was the love of his life. In 1968 he not only became a husband but became an instant uncle and couldn't have been more delighted.

In 1969, Keith and Alice moved to Lawrence where he joined the Linguistics department at the University of Kansas. He studied the grammatical activity of Italian Renaissance humanists and became a leading authority on the history of linguistics. He was fluent or conversant in at least 16 languages. In 1991 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He retired from the University of Kansas in 1995. After retiring, he took extended trips with Alice and her family and moved to Seattle in 2010. Alice passed away in 2011 and he missed her every day. He often told us that he'd had an amazing life, was lucky to have been able to travel, have Alice for his wife, and enjoy his work. He was funny, impish, highly intelligent, always grateful, and a natty dresser. We miss our "chinwags."

Keith is survived by his nephew Jeff Carter and his wife Lisa Peterson, his niece Laurie Carter, his niece Kim Headlee and her family, and extended family in England. He is predeceased by his wife, Alice, and his brothers and sisters-in-law. His legacy lives on through his family, friends and colleagues, the students he taught, and the impact of his publications and linguistics research.

Memorials to Maple Leaf Lutheran Church (10005 32nd Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98125)