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Ann Anthony obituary.
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Obituary: Ann Anthony used linguistics to help bridge cultural divides

Courtesy of Ted Anthony

Obituary: Ann Anthony used linguistics to help bridge cultural divides

Ann Terbrueggen Anthony did not hesitate to board an airplane with her husband and two young daughters and start a new life in Bangkok, Thailand. 

It was 1955, and even though she had had very little previous experience with flying, she made that move to teach English there for almost five years. That journey was just one in a long life dedicated to traveling and “making the world smaller by contributing to the understanding of different cultures through language,” said her daughter, Jan Anthony.

Ms. Anthony, of Hampton, a long-time educator and linguistics researcher, died Saturday at the age of 94 following a two-year battle with dementia. 

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Ms. Anthony went to high school in Detroit before studying linguistics at the University of Michigan. Though they went to high school together, it was at Michigan where she grew close to her future husband of 69 years, Edward Mason Anthony Jr. They drove with their classmates to teach English to migrant workers in the area surrounding the university, often holding lessons in railroad box cars and gasoline stations, their son, Ted Anthony, said. She was still a student during World War II, and worked as a riveter at Ford Motor Co.’s plant in Willow Run, Mich., assembling parts for B-24 Liberators.

She and her husband, who served as the founding chairman of University of Pittsburgh’s linguistics department, made Hampton their permanent home for five decades, but their work took them all over the world. In addition to teaching in Thailand, they were among the first educators from Pitt to travel to China in 1979 to teach after relations with the U.S. normalized. Mr. Anthony died in 2015.

In the 1960s, Ms. Anthony consulted with the Pittsburgh Public Schools district and concluded through her research that an African-American dialect used by children in the city should be treated with its own cultural legitimacy. It was not a popular opinion at the time, Mr. Anthony said.

A year later, she worked with the U.S. State Department on English-teaching seminars in Venezuela. In the 1980s, she was a lecturer and researcher at Pitt, and founded Pitt’s Journal of Hispanic Linguistics and taught English to visiting engineers from China and executives from Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors Corp.

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“She was fascinated by the way language works and the potential that it has to do things,” Mr. Anthony said.

Ms. Anthony was a major contributor and played a “foundational role” in the creation of Pitt’s linguistics programs and courses, said Alan Juffs, director of the university’s English Language Institute. 

“She was a charming and lovely lady,” he said. “Understated, but supremely professional and kind. It was very clear that she and Ed were together a powerhouse in forming the early years of the English Language Institute and the Department of Linguistics.”

She was warm and welcoming to everyone she came across, and loved learning about new cultures, her children said. In the days before her passing, she commented on how lucky she was to have experienced all that she did.

“She had a real drive to do things about problems or situations that she cared about, and one of the things she cared about was international cooperation and communication,” said Lynn Higgins, her oldest daughter.

Ms. Anthony is survived by her three children, Lynn Anthony Higgins of Hanover, N.H.; Janice Louise Anthony of Wakefield, R.I.; and Edward Mason (Ted) Anthony IV of Hampton; and four grandsons.

Burial will be private at Mount Royal Cemetery in Shaler. A public memorial service will be held at a later date.

First Published: December 3, 2018, 9:45 a.m.

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Ann Anthony obituary.  (Courtesy of Ted Anthony)
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