Editor's Note: On August 27, Dr Denis Solomon, a linguist and polyglot of note, and the inspiration behind the PGDip Interpreting Techniques of UWI St Augustine’s Department of Modern Language and Linguistics (DMLL), passed away.
Dr Solomon began working at UWI St Augustine in 1969, and would have a long career that included, among others, positions as a lecturer in Spanish, Linguistics, and French, and later senior lecturer and head of department. He almost single-handedly reorganised the entire structure and orientation of French language teaching on campus, in addition to expanding the programme of Linguistics courses.
Throughout his distinguished career, Dr Solomon held posts as a diplomat, a translator and a conference interpreter. He was also a former member of the Association Internationale des Interprètes de Conférence (AIIC), a columnist and an editorial writer. He was fluent in multiple languages, including English, English Creole, French, French Creole (Patois/Kwéyòl), Italian, Russian, and Spanish.
His most significant piece of published work was entitled The Speech of Trinidad: A Reference Grammar, but he also produced numerous articles and monographs. In 1984, he was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques of the Ministère de l'Education Nationale of France.
The funeral service for Dr Solomon was held on Thursday, 7 September 2023. UWI TODAY is pleased to share reflections on his life by his colleague and friend, Professor Lawrence Carrington.
My earliest recollection of Denis Solomon goes back 71 years to 1952 when I entered Queen’s Royal College. Denis was one of the winners of an Open Island Scholarship in 1951 and he came to school to visit the masters who had been his teachers. When he came into our classroom, we stood and cheered. Our paths would cross again and become intertwined in the late 1960s when he joined the staff of The University of the West Indies.
As colleagues over the next 25 years or so, we collaborated on a few projects that have produced lasting impacts on our university, our field of scholarship, and our region. I refer in particular to our initiative to create a Department of Language and Linguistics at the St Augustine Campus of The UWI. The second collective effort was the founding, together with a cluster of like-minded scholars both within our region and beyond it, of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics in the early 1970s. The third initiative was our engagement with scholars across this region, including Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe to develop a common writing system for the French-Lexicon Creoles of our region.
Working with Denis was not easy. He had a formidable intellect driven by innate intelligence, relentless logic, voracious reading, confidence in the quality of his academic formation, and a commitment to being as right as it was possible to be given available data. He thrived on combative debate. As long as your resistance was based on pertinent data and positions that he considered worthy, he respected you. Woe betide you if you folded or if your resources for response faded in the face of his onslaught. The scope of the references on which he could draw was formidable and enhanced by the range of languages and literatures that he commanded.
His first degree at Cambridge in Modern and Mediaeval Languages provided him a broad platform for developing fluent native-speaker proficiency in English, French, Spanish, and Italian with a working knowledge of Russian as well. His pursuit of Linguistics added French Creole and he applied the array of related knowledge to the analysis of the grammar of Trinidadian English-Lexicon Creole. He wrote two important treatises on Trinidadian. The first was his master’s thesis at Columbia University entitled “The System of Predication in the Speech of Trinidad: A Quantitative Study of Decreolization”, and the second was his PhD dissertation “Syntax and Semantics in Caribbean Creole”. These works eventually led to his 1993 publication entitled “The Speech of Trinidad – A Reference Grammar”.
Denis decided to pursue a PhD later than one would have expected. The truth was that large numbers of people including staff members and students would address him as “Dr Solomon” and he grew tired of correcting them that it should be “Mr Solomon”! So, one day, he scooted into my office and announced “Lawrence, I’ve decided to register for the PhD. People keep calling me Dr Solomon. I might as well do it and done. And you have to supervise me, eh!”
The man even chose his own supervisor! How could I resist? It was an easy job. I just had to make sure he stayed on track.Denis was pivotal in the development at St Augustine of the Postgraduate Diploma in Interpreting Techniques, a programme of significant importance for our region given our geographical location and our socio-political engagements. In all his teaching, he set the bar high and made demands of his students of similar order to those that he made of his colleagues and collaborators.
His scholarly mind was not confined in its activity to his university work. He was a political activist at a crucial time in our socio-political evolution. His membership in the Tapia House movement in the fateful years around 1970 drew him into formal participation in our political life. Even after his formal engagement, his newspaper columns invited sober reflection on important themes with a light touch of humour, enough to make the sting of his views palatable.
For me, one of the most memorable was his column of February 21, 2005, when he subjected our National Anthem to a piercing analysis under the heading “Our Empty National Anthem”! Grammar and literary merit were found wanting.
I always marvelled at how much Denis got done! He kept pace with work on campus, devoted hours to repairing and refitting his boat, spun off into wood craft of a more general nature, engaged in serious political reflection and writing.… His weekends seemed elastic! And if you weren’t careful, he would draw you into the boat refitting activity with an inducement of a good Sunday lime. The lime would include toting wood, sanding and varnishing with the conversation going anywhere over the noises of the woodwork.
If you saw Denis as a rough guy, you did not know him well enough. Show him a baby or a child and there you had Denis the softie! Gentleness personified! He would absolutely melt and become a malleable putty. He loved children and was good at “koochie-koo”, keeping them amused and interested. Our daughters remember Uncle Denis with immediate smiles and memories of a variety of visits.
Elsa, our eldest, shared her memories of him this way: “My childhood impression was of a tall, lumbering bear of a man with a wide cheerful smile. Yes, he had a great smile, and an engaging laugh. Definitely loved a good argument. He was very gentle with children; with us older ones there was gentle teasing and the odd joke. He kind of fills up a room when he walks in, as if his personal energy field moved ahead and around him, carving a space in the air.”
We are the poorer for his passing. He leaves us much to reflect on, admire and emulate.
Thank you.