Ilse Lehiste

Ilse Lehiste (31 January 1922, Tallinn, Estonia – 25 December 2010 Columbus, Ohio) was an Estonian-born American linguist, author of many studies in phonetics.

Ilse Lehiste finished high school in Tallinn and studied piano playing at the Conservatory. In 1942 she began her studies at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Tartu. In 1944 she moved to Germany, where she continued her studies – while working for her keep – at the universities of Leipzig and Hamburg, and obtained a doctoral degree at the University of Hamburg. Her thesis dealt with the work of William Morris, in particular the part concerning Nordic literature. In 1949 she moved to the United States where she defended her second doctoral thesis – this one about linguistics – at the University of Michigan.

She worked at the University of Hamburg, Kansas Wesleyan University, the Detroit Institute of Technology, and the University of Michigan. Finally, at the Ohio State University, she was as associate professor from 1963 and full professor from 1965. Her main fields of research were acoustic phonetics and phonology, prosody, language contacts, Estonian and Serbo-Croatian. In particular, she has done valuable research work on Estonian phonetics. She was also interested in Estonian runic songs and, in collaboration with Jaan Ross, published several works on this topic.

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