Roy Andrew Miller (September 5, 1924 – August 22, 2014) was an American linguist best known as the author of several books on Japanese language and linguistics, and for his advocacy of Korean and Japanese as members of the proposed Altaic language family. Biography Miller was born in Winona, Minnesota, on September 5, 1924, to Andrew and Jessie (née Eickelberry) Miller. In 1953, he completed a Ph.D. in Chinese and Japanese at Columbia University in New York. Long a student of languages, his early work in the 1950s was largely with Chinese and Tibetan. For example, in 1969 he wrote the Encyclopædia Britannica entry on the Tibeto-Burman languages of South Asia. He was Professor of Linguistics at the International Christian University in Tokyo from 1955 to 1963. Subsequently he taught at Yale University; between 1964 and 1970, he was chairman of the department of East and South Asian Languages and Literatures. From 1970 until 1989 he held a similar post at the University of Washington in Seattle. He then taught in Europe, mainly in Germany and Scandinavia. He wrote extensively on the Japanese language, from A Japanese Reader (1963) and The Japanese Language (1967) to Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages (1971) and Nihongo: In Defense of Japanese (1986). He later broadened his scope by linking Korean both to Japanese and Altaic, most notably in Languages and History: Japanese, Korean, and Altaic (1996). On the occasion of his 75th birthday, Professors Karl Menges and Nelly Naumann prepared a Festschrift highlighting his career and including articles on Altaic languages. Selected works Books 1967a. The Japanese Language. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle. 1971. Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1975. The Footprints of the Buddha: An Eighth-Century Old Japanese Poetic Sequence, New Haven (CT): American Oriental Society. 1976. Studies in the Grammatical Tradition in Tibet. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1980. Origins of the Japanese Language: Lectures in Japan during the Academic Year 1977–78. Seattle: University of Washington Press. . 1982. Japan's Modern Myth: The Language and Beyond. Tokyo: John Weatherhill Inc. . 1986. Nihongo: In Defence of Japanese. London: Athlone Press. . 1993. Prolegomena to the First Two Tibetan Grammatical Treatises. (Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde 30.) Vienna: Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien Universität Wien. 1996. Languages and History: Japanese, Korean and Altaic. Oslo: Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture. . Articles 1955a. "Studies in