on the standard language that had a ten-year run (1962–1972) on Belgian (Flemish) television. His interest in language variation was to come to full fruition after his retirement. Coetsem was best known as a specialist in comparative Germanic linguistics. Instead of considering Proto-Germanic as undifferentiated chronologically, he realized that "Proto-Germanic" had lasted a long time and that it should be divided into periods. That insight, in combination with his knowledge of phonetics and phonology led him to a classification of the Germanic strong verbs that differs radically from the traditional one in seven classes, but it explained many of their characteristics and much of their evolution; cf. the title of his 1956 book (translated): 'The system of the strong verbs and the periodization of Proto-Germanic'. An indirect consequence was a new explanation of an old crux in comparative Germanic linguistics, the so-called ē², a long ē that appeared in Proto-Germanic (in a later stage, according to Coetsem) and differed from the long ē inherited from Proto-Indo-European, the ē¹. (The difference is still clearly recognizable in Dutch and German: hier 'here' goes back to Proto-Germanic *hē²r, but waar, wahr 'true', to Proto-Germanic *wē¹ra .) All of that led him to being asked to write the chapter on Proto-Germanic in the Kurzer Grundriß der germanischen Philologie bis 1500 (published in 1970), and it was probably the main reason for him to be invited to Cornell. He continued to work out and refine those ideas until the end of his life; witness his 1990 and 1994 books. For more information on the latter, see Germanic Parent Language, a term that he seems to have introduced. Coetsem was trained in phonetics but not in phonology; when he was in college, phonology was a still a very young branch of linguistics. (Both N. van Wijk's Phonologie and Nikolai Trubetzkoy's Grundzüge der Phonologie were published in 1939.) However, he would do outstanding work in both. He was a member of the team that made the first radiographic images involving the use of a contrast medium of the pronunciation of some Standard Dutch vowels. They were taken at the institute of physiology of the Catholic University of Leuven, where he lectured and taught his courses at the Department of Germanic Philology; even in the 1950s, he supported interdisciplinarity. He was also a cofounder of the speech therapy program at the Catholic University of Leuven. Phonology played an