Terrence Kaufman

[3] Over the course of his career, Kaufman produced descriptive and comparative-historical studies of languages of the Mayan, Siouan, Hokan, Uto-Aztecan, Mixe–Zoquean and Oto-Manguean families.

[4] Along with Lyle Campbell and Thomas Smith-Stark, Kaufman carried out research published in Language (1986) which led to the recognition of Mesoamerica as a linguistic area.

[7] This claim has been rejected by anthropologists Michael Coe and Stephen Houston in 2004 after using the decipher key on a recently discovered jade mask.

In the process, he stopped at the Proyecto Linguistico Francisco Marroquin (PLFM) in Antigua Guatemala, a Guatemalan NGO intent on becoming a national Mayan-based resource institution.

Together with PLFM staff, and inspired in part by MIT Kenneth Hale's 1960s unpublished paper, American Indians in Linguistics, Kaufman was a principal participant in the development of the PLFM's plan to train one hundred community-based native speakers of Mayan languages, mostly primary school graduates, to become descriptive linguists for their own languages.

Kaufman was known by his friends as "Top Kat," after his initials, and sported a distinctive beard, beret and manner of dress unusual in Antigua at the time.

He was the kind of expert (like PLFM colleagues Dr. Nora England and Dr. Judith Maxwell after him) who was committed to sharing his hard-won expertise with native speakers themselves, enabling them to play the dominant roles in decisions about their own languages.