Frans (Camille Cornelis) Van Coetsem (14 April 1919 – 11 February 2002) was a Belgian (Flemish) linguist. After an academic career in Flanders and the Netherlands he was appointed professor at Cornell University in 1968, and consequently he emigrated to the US, where, after a few years, he chose to become a naturalized American citizen.
Life
Coetsem was born on 14 April 1919 in Geraardsbergen, a small town in the southeastern part of the province of East Flanders, on the Franco-Dutch language border. His native language was the (Dutch) dialect of Geraardsbergen. At a very early age, he lost both his parents, and his aunt and uncle raised him and sent him to a French-language boarding school. After finishing high school in 1939, he attended a Nivelles "régendat" (a type of teacher training college below university level), yet another French-language school. However, he was so dissatisfied with the education that he was getting that in 1941, he ended it and switched to the Catholic University of Leuven to study Germanic philology. (At the time, "Germanic philology" included Dutch, English and German languages and literatures as well as a number of courses in philosophy and history.) Even before graduating, he had worked as an interpreter for the British armed forces during the Allied invasion of Germany. He graduated in 1946; his undergraduate thesis dealt with the sounds and the morphology of his native Geraardsbergen dialect. Less than a year later, on 30 April 1947, he married his childhood sweetheart. His Ph.D. thesis, which he defended in 1952, was also devoted to the sounds and the morphology of the Geraardsbergen dialect; his thesis supervisor was L. Grootaers.
However, before he had obtained his degree, he had been hired by the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT) as a trainee editor, which meant moving to Wassenaar, near his job in Leiden. There, he was coached by K.H. Heeroma, who also assisted him in choosing the subject of his "Aggregatie voor het Hoger Onderwijs", which he obtained in 1956. His thesis, published by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) the same year, was a significant breakthrough in the comparative study of the Germanic languages, and it established his international reputation in the field.
In 1957, he was appointed successor to his supervisor L. Grootaers [†1956] at the Germanic Philology department of the Catholic University of Leuven, and he moved back to Belgium. However, in 1963, he also became Extraordinary Professor of comparative Germanic linguistics at Leiden University.
Cornell University invited him as visiting professor for the 1965–1966 academic year. Its research facilities as well as the opportunity to teach mainly graduate students made him decide in 1968 to accept Cornell's offer of tenure.
At Cornell, he supervised a number of Ph.D. students, all of whom went on to have academic careers. After his retirement in 1989, he remained active in supervising graduate students and continuing his research. It was mainly as an emeritus professor that he wrote his important works about language contact, some of which were unfinished at his death and so published posthumously.
About five years after his wife's death, which had occurred on 26 January 1993, he was diagnosed with cancer, which caused his death on 11 February 2002.
Work
Teacher
Coetsem was able to hold his students' attention, whether they were over two hundred, as in his introductory phonetics course at the Catholic University of Leuven, or less than a dozen, seated around the big table in his Cornell office. His lectures were well planned, and he gave them with enthusiasm. In fact, he could argue a point with real passion, when his blackboard was liable to look like an abstract expressionist painting; he was not known for orthodox didactics. However, his argumentation was always clear, and he never lost the big picture, even when a student's question would send him off on a tangent. That often happened, for he welcomed questions: he took his students seriously. (The informality between teaching staff and students was another reason for him to move to Cornell.) He used those occasions to discuss problems on which his research was focusing, which often took his students to the outer edge of modern linguistic research.
As a thesis supervisor, he was anything but heavy-handed. He respected his students too much to overcorrect what they wrote, and he did not mind if they took positions with which he disagreed or if they following methods that were not his. On the contrary, if their work was solid, he would help them improve it on their own terms. The variety of Ph.D. theses that he supervised is quite remarkable.