Mechanicsburg Area High School
Alumni Association
Hall of Fame
Following graduation from MHS in 1952, Marv received
degrees from Dartmouth College in mathematics, and took
a position at Adisadel College in Ghana. Thus began his
long and distinguished career in the world of academia.
While in Africa, Marv traveled to Ethiopia and accepted a
position at Haile Selassie I University where he became interested
in Amharic and linguistics. He returned to attend
graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin where
he earned a Ph.D. in linguistics, his dissertation a generative
study of Amharic verb morphology. Dr. Bender was
recruited and served on the research team of the Language
Survey of Ethiopia which was a Ford Foundation project. He
was widely recognized as the only one with experience in
Ethiopia and knowledge of Amharic on the team. When the
survey was finished, Dr. Bender was appointed at Stanford
University to finish the Ethiopia Survey report. From
1971-1996, Lionel, (the name he preferred), served in
various positions in the Department of Anthropology and
the Department of Foreign Languages at Southern Illinois
University. He retired from Southern Illinois University in
Carbondale in 1996.
Over the years, Dr. Bender wrote numerous scholarly
articles and books based on his research about Ethiopian
and Afroasiatic languages. Among those are “The Languages
of Ethiopia,” (1971), “New Afroasiatic Language
Family,” (1975), and “Omotic Lexicon and Phonology,”
(2003). Because of his linguistic expertise and knowledge,
he was awarded two substantial National Science Foundation
grants to study Ethiopian languages. In addition,
Dr. Bender received a Fullbright-Hays lectureship at the
University of Khartoum in Sudan from 1978-1979. He was
a prominent figure in Afroasiatic and Ethiopian linguistics
for fifty years whose works are among the authoritative
sources on Omotic and Nilo Saharan linguistics. After
retirement, he found time for his long interest in chess and
continued to write and publish. Dr. Bender passed away in
February, 2008.
It is for his exceptional achievements and scholarly
work that he is being inducted posthumously into the MHS
Hall of Fame.
Dr. Bender is survived by his wife, Almaz Teferi; his
sons, Douglas in Redondo Beach, CA, and Gary in Tempe,
AZ; a stepson, Yelias in San Francisco, CA, a stepdaughter,
Lili of Carbondale, IL; several grandchildren, and two
sisters, Elaine Bender Bahn, ‘58 and Winifred Bender, ’53.
